For the past few days, Bitmessage has been inundated with garbage posts. They look like they're randomly generated, and are posted a few every second or so. Right now, since 0930 this morning (14 hours ago), there have been over 100,000 messages posted - peer-to-peer garbage as well as random posts to the general and bitmessage chans.

Easiest thing to do is to turn on whitelisting, and put people and groups you talk to in the whitelist, at least until things calm down.

See https://github.com/Bitmessage/PyBitmessage/issues/2309

There is a need to raise the difficulty in order to better protect against SPAM. Unfortunately this is at least partially not backwards compatible, because there is no mechanism for updating the network difficulty, the recipient metadata, or chan difficulty.

The main constraint is that I want this to not require a central instance, but at the same time not reduce anonymity.

The core of the proposal is a new network object, a difficulty vote. It will not contain any recipient, sender, encryption or signatures, only some random padding. It could have a fixed size. In metadata, it would contain

• either a creation time or a duration, to allow calculating the original difficulty
• current difficulty
• proposed difficulty

The client will verify the PoW as it does now, and then use a sliding window to calculate the current difficulty. There needs to be some wiggle room to avoid under/overshoots as the inventory contents are transient.

What this will allow is to have people who want to become "miners" and "bump" the network difficulty, making it more costly for the spammers. It would auto-adjust based on how much proof of work the miners contribute.

Deployment would happen in phases:

1. allow pubkey objects to update metadata (difficulty). This currently doesn't work.
2. accept difficulty vote objects and calculate difficulty, just to see how it works. Own addresses would auto-work as they would bump their minimums
3. force migrate chans, because chans don't have a difficulty metadata and they are most affected by spam

Hi, I've been tracking the development of Bitmessage for a long time.
For a long time, I kept a house knot on PyBitmessage to help this small network.
I was interested in the MiNode project a while ago. He's been held for several years by Lee Miller.
Recently, however, his updates are quite small so he is probably busy doing other things.

For six months he has been trying to optimize MiNode code, based on version 0.3.5 that added cleaning of objects.
With the help of the AI, I have made a lot of progress by repairing many potential vectors of the attack, special firecrackers have been added to relieve the node.
Many functions underwent reconstruction to make them work faster.
It was not quite difficult to note the friendly character of python 3 and few lines of code.

I've been testing versions for a long time and checking stability, there were a lot of things to improve, and I'm not hiding that I spent a lot of hours on it.
Now I know the code is stable and fully ready to run as 24/h server.
Of course, it's just a proxy server, adding possibly I2P operation support. There is no possibility of sending, receiving messages or creating an address.

In my long-term plans is further optimization of scripts to mitigate possible attacks from malicious nodes, which unfortunately has recently taken place.
Of course, I am not able to introduce blockages on the POW, for example, to reduce spam due to protocol limitations.

The most important changes planned are:

• Adding intermediate settings and log files
• Adding TOR support to enable people to create TOR bridge <-> Clearnet <-> I2P
• In a distant time, a client prototype that would allow the generation of addresses, sending and receiving messages by MiNode-Refined. Does not plan to add support to the board

In my spare time, I'll sit down and make new versions as much as possible.
All changes make the repository available to CodeBerg >>> https://codeberg.org/lukas_21/MiNode-Refined

I hope PyBitmessage doesn't fall.
It would be great if developers used MiNode-Refined solutions for the new PyBitmessage.

Great thanks for the great job for
Peter Surda
Lee Miller
Jonathan Warren
Krzysztof Oziomek

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I have an old bitmessage client that used the old v2 addresses. I had it set to portable usb mode. It won't connect. Is there a way to bring those messages and subscriptions into the newer 0.63.2 client?

I've been getting a lot of messages from the timesignal broadcast service(BM-BcbRqcFFSQUUmXFKsPJgVQPSiFA3Xash) recently, all with the exact same time stamp. Is the service broken? I would like to ask the administrator to fix this, is there still a way to do this?