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generally you are correct. But most blockchains have a central "seed" server that is supposed to always be up. Furthermore if the seed server goes down and none

by throwaway2016a 8y ago

generally you are correct. But most blockchains have a central "seed" server that is supposed to always be up. Furthermore if the seed server goes down and none of the peers you have previously connected to are reachable you are an island in those cases. With that said, from the repo. This one is based on https://nebulas.io/ https://nebulas.io/

beaner 8y ago
This is the first time I've ever heard of "seed servers". Do you have any links explaining such a precedent?
- throwaway2016a 8y ago
  Most blockchains, including as far as I know all Bitcoin based blockchains (including Bitcoin itself) have two types of seeds embedded in them. First the IP of seed servers (nodes) and second the hostname of a DNS based seed lookup. The DNS host name as well as the IP addresses of the seed nodes are actually embedded in the source code itself. They exist for new peers to discover people to connect to. And if the case of seed nodes they also act as peers themselves. If all those nodes and the DNS seed go down. The DNS is constantly rotated to contain A records for a large number of peers which new peers will randomly pick from. In the case of Bitcoin the seed servers are all run by different organizations and there are a lot of them. Smaller coins may actually only have 1 or 2 seed servers all run by the same people. Some blockchains allow multi-cast based discovery but that only helps if you happen to be on the same network as another node. Best link I could find with the time I have: https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/14371/what-is-a-dns-seed-node-vs-a-seed-node https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/14371/what-is-a-...
Vinnl 8y ago
Right, so compared to a centralised solution it's slightly more resilient, but still largely reliant on an always-up seed server just like e.g. LastPass is dependent on LastPass's server being up?

beaner 8y ago

This is the first time I've ever heard of "seed servers". Do you have any links explaining such a precedent?

throwaway2016a 8y ago
Most blockchains, including as far as I know all Bitcoin based blockchains (including Bitcoin itself) have two types of seeds embedded in them. First the IP of seed servers (nodes) and second the hostname of a DNS based seed lookup. The DNS host name as well as the IP addresses of the seed nodes are actually embedded in the source code itself. They exist for new peers to discover people to connect to. And if the case of seed nodes they also act as peers themselves. If all those nodes and the DNS seed go down. The DNS is constantly rotated to contain A records for a large number of peers which new peers will randomly pick from. In the case of Bitcoin the seed servers are all run by different organizations and there are a lot of them. Smaller coins may actually only have 1 or 2 seed servers all run by the same people. Some blockchains allow multi-cast based discovery but that only helps if you happen to be on the same network as another node. Best link I could find with the time I have: https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/14371/what-is-a-dns-seed-node-vs-a-seed-node https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/14371/what-is-a-...

Vinnl 8y ago

Right, so compared to a centralised solution it's slightly more resilient, but still largely reliant on an always-up seed server just like e.g. LastPass is dependent on LastPass's server being up?