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On the contrary, botnets are far more of a problem in systems designed to make it cheap to run a validator node. This creates an obvious opportunity for a Sybil
by nybble41 7y ago
On the contrary, botnets are far more of a problem in systems designed to make it cheap to run a validator node. This creates an obvious opportunity for a Sybil attack: spawn a few thousand nodes on other people's insecure IoT devices and you immediately control far more than the requisite 1/3 or 2/3 of the network. It's a lot harder to control 51% of the hash rate for a PoW design like Bitcoin which effectively requires specialized hardware to mine competitively.
I'm assuming they implement countermeasures against simply running a bunch of VMs or containers masquerading as a large number of independent nodes, for example by looking for multiple connections from the same IP addresses or subnet. Otherwise botnets would indeed be unnecessary to carry out the attack—anyone could do it from home with a modest PC.