The BIP-324 Series

Confusing and Diffusing Those Bits

BIP-324 introduced version 2 of the peer to peer communication protocol for bitcoin nodes. Version 1 of the protocol is entirely in the open, no encryption, just plaintext over the wire. Blockchain data is public information so what is the big deal? Plaintext communication of bitcoin data makes it way too easy for ISPs to see who is using bitcoin, and then censor bitcoin activity. Ideally, all parts of the bitcoin ecosystem use encryption and remain in the dark for maximum decentralization.

BIP-324 defines an encryption scheme tuned for the bitcoin use case, as well as some performance tweaks of the p2p messages themselves.

I work on a small library, bip324, which brings BIP-324 to the rust bitcoin ecosystem. This library depends on the purpose built encryption scheme implementation which has been spun out into the chacha20_poly1305 library.