Sure, but unless the 1000 nodes the attacker owns do something useful for actually routing data, you only need to route to one non-censorious node with the same capabilities who, despite being only one node, will have the greater ability to get that transaction into a block by simply not Sybilling it or Sybilling it less. If the Sybil and honest node truly are otherwise equal, the non-Sybil always gets the transaction into a block first.
Stepping back: you don't even need to trust initial hops based on their identity - they can offer proof of how many hops their routing chains accumulate by showing users those transactions, linked to historical blocks, which are expensive to fabricate.
You can use a succinct commitment scheme to prevent would-be Sybils from only sharing their 'well-routed' transactions: A node commits to a Merkle Tree header hash, and the user is allowed to randomly sample from branches in the tree.
A user expects to be provided with their random sample and see that:
1) The transactions are from a sufficiently 'worked' on chain which is prohibitively expensive to fabricate.
2) The transactions involve the router committing to the Merkle Tree.
3) The transactions involve less hops than other routers the user is sampling transactions from.
The Sybil you are describing now must divide the size of their Merkle Tree sampling for every new identity they wish to inhabit - and if they are in fact consistently Sybilling users, will be forced (statistically) to reveal their excess hops.
What you describe is still very inconvenient for users - to have to sort through all these nodes and compare their samplings, but it is at least a demonstration that this Sybilling behavior is not sustainable. I tried to assume the worst case scenario (related to your concern) when devising the above scheme.
The scheme above handles the case where nodes pose as many in order to extract more fees and reduce their competition, but now it seems like you are thinking about absolute censorship.
Otherwise, if there are no extra hops, then what is the attack? A single router (posing as many) gets transactions into blocks as fast as anyone else?
As soon as he starts Sybilling that data to earn more fees or censoring it, every recourse I mentioned (not just may last comment) makes it unsustainable and unprofitable comparatively - opening the door for others to take his spot.
If your point the whole time was a censorship operation through Sybilling, the user can identify that quickly AND honest nodes will seek out those users. I addressed it earlier - the more extreme the censorship, the greater the incentives for other nodes to remedy it themselves.
>The scheme above handles the case where nodes pose as many in order to extract more fees and reduce their competition, but now it seems like you are thinking about absolute censorship.
Yes, please scroll up. Two different attacks were explained along with saying this article only solves one of them.
> There are no excess hops in the attack I am describing.
As above, you're not describing a sybil attack. Adding a bunch of 1st hop nodes to a network doesn't mean that those nodes are conducting a sybil attack.
If you want to leverage them in an attack, you would have to have them send their TXS to a central block producer that gathers the TXS from all of these first-hop nodes and then tries to use all of their collected-work to orphan the blocks/work from honest nodes in the network. If you work through the paper, you'll see that this attack is provably-costly.
You could theoretically avoid the penalty if you gave all of your 1st hop nodes the same keypair, but in that case you don't have multiple identities on the network and you don't have a sybil attack...
The point of describing such a scheme is that it covers the hole you think you found. You complain "the article doesn't solve this problem," "your scheme doesn't this problem-" okay, well they each solve one of them. The fact that the scheme relies on the properties proven in the article is not incidental.
Do you have any specific critiques? I'm not going to guess your meaning if you aren't going to address my points directly.
Stepping back: you don't even need to trust initial hops based on their identity - they can offer proof of how many hops their routing chains accumulate by showing users those transactions, linked to historical blocks, which are expensive to fabricate.
You can use a succinct commitment scheme to prevent would-be Sybils from only sharing their 'well-routed' transactions: A node commits to a Merkle Tree header hash, and the user is allowed to randomly sample from branches in the tree.
A user expects to be provided with their random sample and see that:
1) The transactions are from a sufficiently 'worked' on chain which is prohibitively expensive to fabricate.
2) The transactions involve the router committing to the Merkle Tree.
3) The transactions involve less hops than other routers the user is sampling transactions from.
The Sybil you are describing now must divide the size of their Merkle Tree sampling for every new identity they wish to inhabit - and if they are in fact consistently Sybilling users, will be forced (statistically) to reveal their excess hops.
What you describe is still very inconvenient for users - to have to sort through all these nodes and compare their samplings, but it is at least a demonstration that this Sybilling behavior is not sustainable. I tried to assume the worst case scenario (related to your concern) when devising the above scheme.