CSE1006 Study Guide - Final Guide: Bitcoin Network, Bitcoin, Double-Spending
Document Summary
We will have to keep in mind that bitcoin nodes don"t have any persistent long term identities. This is another difference from how traditional distributive consensus algorithms operate. If nodes had identities, it would make things a lot easier: it would be possible to include in the protocol specific references to nodes ids. the system would be more secure. If nodes were identified and weren"t able to create new identities, we could make assumption on malicious nodes and try to eliminate them from the network, to be sure that at least. There are a couple of reasons why bitcoin nodes don"t have identities: bitcoin protocol is a peer-to-peer decentralized system. So there is no central authority that assignes identities to nodes and verify that they"re not creating new nodes. This could take to a sybils attack: malicious nodes could create a lot of copies of nodes all controlled by them to look like there are a lot of different participants.