I don't think we have anything implemented currently, but we could implement some kind of reputation system. But the problem is that it's subjective to something that is called civil attacks. If you actually somehow figure out that that particular peers are mining, you can target your attack to the miners. They are kind of like this weak part of the entire network. So there are a couple of ways to avoid that. Like mining on two nodes in parallel or preventing too many peers from connecting to your mining nodes. It would obviously theoretically be possible to attack the network and actually take it down. It just requires enough resources.
In this episode, we are joined by Tomasz Drwięga, a Core Developer at Parity Technologies, to discuss the lifecycle of a transaction on the Ethereum network and how the mempool works.
We will be covering the following topics:
- What a mempool/transaction queue/transaction pool is.
- How a transaction reaches a mempool and what the mempool does with it.
- Looking at what causes the CPU increase and delays in the network.
- What happens when a transaction gets stuck.
- Gossip.
- The security properties of the mempool.
- What a network attack could look like.
Here are some additional links and ressources if you want to dig deeper.