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On 19 August 2014 20:21:35 GMT-04:00, Jeff Garzik <jgar...@bitpay.com> wrote:
>On Tue, Aug 19, 2014 at 8:16 PM, Peter Todd <p...@petertodd.org> wrote:
>> That is simply incorrect. The resources required to do that kind of
>monitoring are very high; even the NSA can't pull it off consistently
>for
>
>Hardly.  For example, when a new block arrives on the network, a
>single observer at a single location may obtain a binary "likely|not
>bitcoin protocol" decision from a spike in usage correlated with
>sudden, global network activity after a period of inactivity.  I'll
>not detail all such metrics.

Emphasis on "likely", at best. Forcing you adversary to rely on uncertain 
statistics is a huge improvement over the status quo. Secondly your example is 
of a new block; the more general concern is determining where a given 
transaction originated. In the best of circumstances determining the origin of 
a few hundred bytes of days interspersed in dozens of kB/s of buffered data 
streams is very difficult and expensive even without padding and/or random 
delay features.

Again, I've spoken to people like Jacob Applebaum about this who have a solid 
understanding of what the NSA is actually capable of, and they've confirmed the 
above. Don't let perfect be the enemy of good.

Of course, that's not to say we shouldn't cost-benefit analysis the 
implementation; not using straight OpenSSL for this is a wise decision. Hence 
the suggestion of using the existing and tested Tor support to encrypt by 
default.
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