DPOS Resilience From Government Censorship

[pc]

What protects the anonymity of the witness nodes?  What's to prevent an attacker from finding the replacements quickly? 

Well, it's not like the nodes (i. e. the actual servers) are advertising themselves as witnesses. How would you find a witness server?

To find out the location of a witness server, an attacker could attempt to measure at what time nodes become aware of blocks signed by a certain witness. But a witness node does not (or at least should not) have an open p2p port for everyone to connect, which makes it close to impossible for an attacker to find the actual IP address. At least for an attacker with reasonable power. Witnesses can put additional protective layers around their nodes, like connecting only to trusted relay nodes, and hiding their own traffic in IPSEC.

Similarly, the witnesses themselves (i. e. the owners of the blockchain accounts), can hide themselves by using different nodes to publish their own transactions, connecting only via TOR, and so on.

[yvv]

What protects the anonymity of the witness nodes?  What's to prevent an attacker from finding the replacements quickly? 

Also, it's not just attacks that take them out entirely that we have to worry about.  What if they're all corrupted, but still operational?

A few owners of Chinese exchange can collude and change bitAsset rules at their pleasure right now. But we should not worry, this is cool.

[chamber]

What protects the anonymity of the witness nodes?  What's to prevent an attacker from finding the replacements quickly? 

Also, it's not just attacks that take them out entirely that we have to worry about.  What if they're all corrupted, but still operational?   

[pc]

If the witnesses come under attack they can be replaced with anonymous users in no time. It might be difficult to track down the nodes, too - you can only attack the datacenter if you know where a witness node is located.

[chamber]

I agree.  Daniel Larimer's blasé response to this concern was rather disappointing. 

"Dragomauri, [Jun 7, 2017, 2:51:38 PM]: Daniel, aren't you worried that the 21 masternode/full nodes could be blacklisted by ISPs? Could EOS work on tor or i2p?

Daniel:  neither has sufficient bandwidth

Daniel:  there are datacenters around the world"

A state level actor could easily buy out or put the squeeze on 21 individuals, if they were known.  Heck, even relatively smalltime criminal enterprises, such as carding rings, botnet operators, and ponzi schemers could probably put up enough money to cripple the network. 

[spider-crab]

I've had this question for a while more specifically about EOS... How big will a validators facility need to be? Are we talking a server that will fit in a closet? A house? It seems if there are only 21 that it is an easy target for a coordinated attack to take it down. If it is impossible for state actors to take down all nodes, can they make it illegal to run EOS on your computer? Is this actually enforceable?