From Stacker News (
https://stacker.news/items/1463982)
At the end of March, there was some excitement about a set of 3000 nodes all coming from similar IP addresses (
https://stacker.news/items/1461065). These nodes were all being run by the same entity, a project called bitprojects-io (
https://x.com/bitprojects_io).
bitprojects posted this[^1] about their rationale for the project:
This is not an attack, this has been a 2 year project to prove a vulnerability in how nodes communicate.
Bitprojects provided further details[^2] about the connections their 3000 nodes had made:
3040 "fake" nodes are actually serving traffic and have 75k inbound connections from 33k unique source IPs.
On 30 March 2026, bitprojects posted[^3] that the project would be shutting down:
Current inbound connection stats: 80,526 inbound connections from 35,127 unique source IPs.
Current outbound TCP/8333 traffic: 5475.1 Mbps
This will be the last post of these stats, as I will begin shutting down this node infrastructure at midnight UTC.
The intended outcome of this 2 year project was to point out (and then prove, as requested) that there is a significant vulnerability in how bitcoin nodes communicate. That outcome has been reached, as the people who can understand the vulnerability have observed and acknowledged. There is no longer a reason to keep this running, so I'm shutting it down and will be looking for other ways to contribute.
As bitprojects nodes began shutting down, the always vigilant @0xB10C noticed a sudden surge in connections to their nodes (as did several other users on BNOC (I really want to start calling this site Bai-noc, as in Bai-noc-u-lars).[^4]
I noticed that on my monitoring nodes, nearly across the board (ignoring ones that already had full connection slots), the inbound connections steeply increased on 2026-03-31 at around 00:12 UTC ( March 30, 2026 7:12 PM).
Bitprojects concluded with this statement,[^5] which is a good reminder:
There is a tendency to believe that nodes and node counts generally represent individuals in some reasonable ratio. This is a false belief. A single individual or entity can control tens of thousands of fully functional nodes, at far less cost than assumed. This should be defended against in various ways.
[^1]:
https://x.com/bitprojects_io/status/2037750270877180222[^2]:
https://x.com/bitprojects_io/status/2037771483724812624[^3]:
https://x.com/bitprojects_io/status/2038702695335297469[^4]:
https://bnoc.xyz/t/steep-increase-in-inbound-connections-on-2026-03-31-at-00-12-utc/108[^5]:
https://x.com/bitprojects_io/status/2039423712231838103
