Exploring Ethereum's Hidden Network: TopoShot's New Method

Ethereum runs on a peer-to-peer network that's crucial for its security, user privacy, and network availability. Knowing how this network looks (its topology) is a big deal, but it's hard to figure out because the information is buried deep inside individual network nodes. This is where TopoShot comes in – it's a new tool that uses Ethereum's transaction replacement rules to map out the network. TopoShot works with popular Ethereum clients like Geth and Parity, and it's super accurate, at least according to tests on local nodes.

But Ethereum's network is huge, so measuring it all at once is tough. TopoShot gets around this by running a smart schedule that lets it take measurements in chunks. And to be fair, it adjusts its workload to avoid bothering the network too much. When tested on various Ethereum networks, TopoShot found some interesting stuff. For example, it found that the major test networks (like Ropsten and Rinkeby) are more connected than you'd expect, which makes them tough to split up. On the main Ethereum network, it discovered that some important services, like mining pools, tend to pick their neighbors in a way that makes the network a bit centralized.

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