How can I find well-connected nodes?

If I am a merchant accepting 0-confirmation transactions I should protect myself against race attacks. Several resources state that I should configure bitcoin daemon to not listen for incoming connections (parameter -nolisten) and only connect to "well-connected" hosts (using multiple "connect=" parameter).

Question: How do I know which hosts are "well-connected" and suitable (long-running, no dial-up...)? Also it seems I can not rely on the mining pools because they probably have a limit on connections which might be already reached.

TripleSpeeder

Posted 2012-06-20T18:25:21.227

Reputation: 510

possible duplicate of What nodes are best for lessening the risk of loss from a race attack

– Stephen Gornick – 2012-06-20T19:33:27.737

Answers

You could try connecting to various mining pools, fallback nodes or seed nodes. Those should be well connected.

The best option, however, would be to host your own Bitcoin node on a server and set it to connect to a lot of outbound peers. This would also ensure that you would be able to see most transactions quickly and also broadcast the transactions that interest you to more peers.

All in all, it is best not to rely on third-party nodes if you can set up your own well connected node. Also, you should also consider a pre-mined double spend attack that would be undetectable no matter how many nodes you are connected to.

ThePiachu

Posted 2012-06-20T18:25:21.227

Reputation: 41 594

Great, i did not find the fallback nodes wiki page so far. Also the point with setting up an own node with many outbound peers is good. – TripleSpeeder – 2012-06-21T12:57:56.837

@TripleSpeeder I'm glad you found my answer useful. – ThePiachu – 2012-06-21T14:57:45.190

BlockChain.info now provides a list of hub nodes. The top entries from that list are all well connected.

Stephen Gornick

Posted 2012-06-20T18:25:21.227

Reputation: 26 118

1That page is down – mixdev – 2014-06-21T07:54:06.820

bitnodes.earn.com have a list of all connected nodes and you can even add on your node.

You can choose the country and bitcoin version, Satoshi:0.16.0

Adam

Posted 2012-06-20T18:25:21.227

Reputation: 3 215