OpenSats Work-Log 7

Friday, October 31, 2025

This is a copy of the 7th work-log I sent to OpenSats for my LTS grant.

Disclaimer: Some information that is not (or not yet) meant to be published may have been redacted.

How did you spend your time?

Publications & Talks

Bitcoin Core

peer-observer

A tool and infrastrucuture to monitor for attacks and anomalies in the Bitcoin network with passive monitoring.

I worked on the tooling, the infrastructure, and a demo instance over the past few months.

Tool

https://github.com/0xB10C/peer-observer

Since August, there have been 180+ commits in that repo across 57 PRs by 4 authors. I’m only listing the most interesting ones below:

Infrastructure

Next to the tooling component of peer-observer, there is also a infrastructure component for running nodes, connecting the extractors to the nodes, collecting system metrics, and more. Since this is infrastructure is defined as code for NixOS systems, it’s possible to track in git and share. Previously, the infrastructure and individual honey pot host definitions were mixed and sharing them would have revealed too much information about the honey pots. However, I spent a bit of time extracting an opinionated library for defining peer-observer hosts. This has multiple benefits:

  • the host definitions can be tested in CI with full integration tests
  • the library can be published as FOSS and used by others too, if they want
  • the “production” implementation (i.e. “honey pot host definitions”) can remain private
  • the library can be used to set up a fully public demo instance

The library can be found in https://github.com/0xB10C/peer-observer-infra-library but as of writing, is still missing a bunch of documentation.

A fully public demo instance (sponsored by Localhost Research) is available on https://demo.peer.observer and the infrastructure definitions (using the above library) can be found in https://github.com/0xB10C/peer-observer-infra-demo.

Bitcoin Network Operations Collective (bnoc.xyz)

I hinted at something similar in https://b10c.me/projects/024-peer-observer/#a-bitcoin-network-operations-collective. The https://bnoc.xyz is a first step in bringing such a collective forward. While I haven’t announced it publicly yet, the forum is meant for people to post their raw network observations and allow for discussions on network events.

So far, I’ve been mainly been posting old notes there and a few others have started to post their observations too. I plan to annouce it in the next few months.

Misc

What do you plan to work on next quarter?

  • peer-observer-infra-library:
    • work on set up documentation and better README
    • plenty of other open issues
  • peer-observer tooling:
  • bnoc.xyz
    • annouce it publicly and continue filling it with content
    • set up a backup and a simple HTML mirroring for bnoc
    • while at it, set up a backup for delvingbitcoin too and mirror posts
  • Based on recent discussions, we noticed that we don’t have good data on block propagation. Possibly add some monitoring there.
  • blog posts:
    • I have data on Bitcoin nodes upgrading, and plan to publish a blog post or similar on this at some point.
    • I’m expecting to get data on historical block propagation soon. This allows to look into how e.g. non-standard transaction really affect block proagation.
  • The KIT DSN has been running P2P network monitoring and block propagation for close to 10 years now, however they might shutdown some of their services next year. It would be good to set up some block propatagion monitoring for our self.

My open-source work is currently funded by an OpenSats LTS grant. You can learn more about my funding and how to support my work on my funding page.

Creative Commons License Text and images on this page are licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License

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January 31, 2026

OpenSats Work-Log 8

This is a copy of the 8th work-log I sent to OpenSats for my LTS grant.

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October 1, 2025

Support from LocalhostResearch for peer-observer

Localhost Research supported my peer-observer project by sponsoring three servers for a demo instance, which can be found on demo.peer.observer. Compared to the public.peer.observer instance, this allows everyone to explore the metrics and data extracted from two Bitcoin Core nodes, while no information about the “production” honey pot nodes is leaked.

The full NixOS infrastructure is published on https://github.com/peer-observer/infra-demo.