CODEWITHSUNDEEP
ethereum
mhaddad
mhaddad

Reputation: 119

Are bootnodes central nodes?

I'm attempting to create a private PoA ethereum network and I've been using morden, ropsten and rinkeby for a while. I didn't realize before that network nodes discovery is made by a connection to some bootnodes. Are these nodes central? And thus, isn't it a big decentralization lack?

I mean, if bootnodes are only few and are set at the beginning of a network creation, we can imagine that those nodes are fraudulent (in the sense of pointing to fraudulent BC nodes). No?

Thank's in advance for your replies

Upvotes: 1

Views: 1304

Answers (1)

NopOp
NopOp

Reputation: 66

Yes, the bootnodes are central, and for the main and test networks are hardcoded in bootnodes.go.

The "enode://" protocol includes the public key as well as the IP address for these nodes, so you're still effectively trusting the Ethereum Foundation, but it should be secure. From there additional peers will be shared with your node.

Some more details on how connectivity works can be found on the wiki here.

Upvotes: 1

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