ISP's meddling with bitcoin protocol?

[mechew]

I'm just throwing this out there because I'm starting to dig into my issues.

I've complained a few times about how irregular confirmations are and I'm starting to troubleshoot to identify the issue and one thing I noticed is when I'm connected to my vpn, which routes my internet through it, my transactions are almost instant.  When I disable and its just home internet, Comcast, my transactions are sporadic and can some times take over 1 hour. 

Last night I had 5 that took way too long which prompted the curiosity into my ISP.

I'm not a bitcoin expert but I know its similar to bittorrent and I remember reading about Comcast being one of the ISP's that were messing with bittorrent to throttle it which prompted the net neutrality argument.

Now my bittorrents don't seem to be slow but their transfer speed is far from my max no matter what torrent I select or how many seeds.

Anyone else notice anything?

[1713939167]

1713939167

[1713939167]

1713939167

[DannyHamilton]

I've complained a few times about how irregular confirmations are and I'm starting to troubleshoot to identify the issue and one thing I noticed is when I'm connected to my vpn, which routes my internet through it, my transactions are almost instant.  When I disable and its just home internet, Comcast, my transactions are sporadic and can some times take over 1 hour.

Once the network sees your transaction, your internet connection has nothing to do with how quickly your transactions get confirmed.  Any anecdotal evidence you think you've seen to the contrary is due to selective memory and normal variations in a small sample size.

I'm not a bitcoin expert but I know its similar to bittorrent

Other than the fact that communication is peer-to-peer, there is very little else that bitTorrent and Bitcoin have in common.

[jonald_fyookball]

Also distributed storage.  Although bitcoin's is more redundant than distributed .

[odolvlobo]

I've complained a few times about how irregular confirmations are and I'm starting to troubleshoot to identify the issue and one thing I noticed is when I'm connected to my vpn, which routes my internet through it, my transactions are almost instant.  When I disable and its just home internet, Comcast, my transactions are sporadic and can some times take over 1 hour.

Once the network sees your transaction, your internet connection has nothing to do with how quickly your transactions get confirmed.  Any anecdotal evidence you think you've seen to the contrary is due to selective memory and normal variations in a small sample size.

In other words, the first confirmation of a transaction takes an average of 10 minutes regardless of your connection speed. The actual time can vary between a few seconds to an hour.

[KyrosKrane]

I'm not a bitcoin expert but I know its similar to bittorrent

Other than the fact that communication is peer-to-peer, there is very little else that bitTorrent and Bitcoin have in common.

That's not an insignificant concern, though. A lot of ISPs still have a knee-jerk "p2p is bad" reaction, whether due to ignorance or pressure from the copyright industries. I remember reading a story about an ISP that explicitly banned all p2p apps on their network; and a surprising number of hosting providers ban p2p as well, which can impact publicly hosted nodes.  There were also cases where an ISP would effectively commit a man-in-the-middle attack against http traffic to insert their own advertising into a Web page; I vaguely remember that it worked against https as well, due to the ISP's installer putting their own certificates into the client's trusted list. So there's a history of having to deal with hostile ISPs.

It might be worth exploring the ways that a hostile ISP could interfere with or block bitcoin data, both at a network level (blocking p2p, slowing it down) and at a data level (modifying the actual data being transmitted), and how the protocol and the reference client handle (or should handle) such attacks.

[e4xit]

...
Other than the fact that communication is peer-to-peer, there is very little else that bitTorrent and Bitcoin have in common.

This is actually sort of a (big?) deal to me, potentially, as my ISP limits my P2P traffic to 0.5KB/s - 1.5KB/s.

Now I know that this is probably actually still fast enough to upload a transaction, but what it says to me is that an ISP could, if ordered to, block P2P traffic, right?

Of course I bought VPN subscription so that I can download P2P at my full bandwidth of 38Mb/s

[piotr_n]

that may make sense.
if ISP had set a throttle on a "p2p traffic" and they would measure bitcoin as such, having a torrent node running could have basically consume all the p2p limit, thus living far less for bitcoin than you actually think it has.

[bassguitarman]

It's scary to think about this..  Internet providers could essentially kill anything they view as a threat.

[freedomno1]

To my knowledge ISPs have not messed with Bitcoin at this time but it is a possibility Comcast is not one of the best companies out there if you know how hard it is for cities to get municipal wire aka local internet installed in their cities, also Comcast does keep IP logs for 180 days so they do sniff their traffic anyways it piqued my curiosity tell me how it goes
https://torrentfreak.com/how-long-does-your-isp-store-ip-address-logs-120629/

[DobZombie]

Bitcoinqt can clog up your bandwidth.

I know that my gaming servers ping goes from 300ms to 29ms after I close bitcoinqt

[johnatan32]

I noticed a problem similar to that

[n2nshad0w]

Bitcoinqt can clog up your bandwidth.

I know that my gaming servers ping goes from 300ms to 29ms after I close bitcoinqt

I've also has this issue.  So the question is am I using that much bandwidth, or is my ISP throttling me?

[tl121]

Bitcoin core may suck all available bandwidth if you run it over a router connected to an ISP over DSL, which typically has a decent download speed but a pathetic upload speed.  Things may run fine for several days, but sooner or later one or more newbies will start downloading the 20 GB blockchain through your computer. At this point if you have a typical home router that allocates available bandwidth in a dumb way your Internet connection will be hosed. 

A simple solution is to limit the upload bandwidth that bitcoin core can get.  Since bitcoin-core does not provide any control for this (unlike most bittorrent clients) you will have to use some other method of limiting its access. I found that my router (leased from my ISP) provided some quality of service feature that would allow me to limit the bandwidth of each of my computers by putting their uploads into separate queues, but this didn't help the problem for me because I was running bitcoin core and other software on the same machine (a Windows 7 system).

I fixed my problem by using the Windows Group Policy Manager and adding a rule to limit the upload bandwidth used by bitcoind.exe.  This got the job done.  I set it to about 50% of my available upload bandwidth, which is more than enough to keep up with new transactions and new blocks, while still allowing people to download old blocks, albeit at a slow rate.  Now web browsing is unaffected by running the bitcoin node on the same computer. I also have another computer that controls some miners.  This machine was getting a lot of stales until I solved my congestion problem.

[jonald_fyookball]

an ISP over DSL, which typically has a decent download speed but a pathetic upload speed. 

why is that?  that always pissed me off.   

[isidore]

an ISP over DSL, which typically has a decent download speed but a pathetic upload speed. 

why is that?  that always pissed me off.   

Just the way that it was designed. They had to split the freq spectrum between download and upload. Since high download speeds sell better they portioned a greater amount to it.

[isidore]

Bitcoinqt can clog up your bandwidth.

I know that my gaming servers ping goes from 300ms to 29ms after I close bitcoinqt

I've also has this issue.  So the question is am I using that much bandwidth, or is my ISP throttling me?

This affected me during initial sync only. Do you experience it after your initial sync?

[Sonicprince]

This affected me during initial sync only. Do you experience it after your initial sync?

Not unusual for the QT client to upload up to 700MB of data a day for me, I would expect this to be dependent on your ISP, and the number of other clients on that network.

[freedombit]

It's scary to think about this..  Internet providers could essentially kill anything they view as a threat.

Yes. What ever happened to mesh networks?

Also, Internet via electricity conduits. I recall seeing something like this. I think it was called freedombox, and being sold in the middle east to provide homes with access to the Internet via the electricity grid. Similar thinking to crypto currency - no central authority, so it couldn't be easily regulated.

[Sonicprince]

Hi freedombit

Also, Internet via electricity conduits. I recall seeing something like this. I think it was called freedombox, and being sold in the middle east to provide homes with access to the Internet via the electricity grid. Similar thinking to crypto currency - no central authority, so it couldn't be easily regulated.

Problem with internet (any network) via the electricity grid is the attenuation with every spike arrestor, connection, transformer, meter box etc, even if you bypass transformers and other barriers your talking about a lot of money/time and effort when it's cheaper just to run a new cable that's meant for data networks, or use whats already there for coms, like telephone cable.

no central authority, so it couldn't be easily regulated.

you also require some form of agreement between hosts so they can talk to each other, routing tables, owner information, DNS etc.
No reason it cant be 'self regulated' but thats another topic

[freedombit]

Hi freedombit

Also, Internet via electricity conduits. I recall seeing something like this. I think it was called freedombox, and being sold in the middle east to provide homes with access to the Internet via the electricity grid. Similar thinking to crypto currency - no central authority, so it couldn't be easily regulated.

Problem with internet (any network) via the electricity grid is the attenuation with every spike arrestor, connection, transformer, meter box etc, even if you bypass transformers and other barriers your talking about a lot of money/time and effort when it's cheaper just to run a new cable that's meant for data networks, or use whats already there for coms, like telephone cable.

no central authority, so it couldn't be easily regulated.

you also require some form of agreement between hosts so they can talk to each other, routing tables, owner information, DNS etc.
No reason it cant be 'self regulated' but thats another topic

Maybe some wireless mesh then. And yes, I agree that there would need to be some sort of voluntary regulation amongst users.