the next community meeting is this Saturday 11th @ 16:00 UTC monero-project/meta #791 , BusyBoredom has put up a CCS proposal as a suggestion for 'step 3' in resolving xmrSale ahead of the meeting so we can have a look / suggest things. more info on that (and AcceptXMR) here: repo.getmonero.org/monero-project/ccs-proposals/-/merge_requests/374

Syncing the blockchain, I often see "Host x.x.x.x blocked". What causes a host to be blocked?

d34d8its: This paper may be out of date, but here's what it says: "Periodically, the Monero P2P system may notice unwanted behavior from its peers. This includes: not maintaining a stable connection, not fulfilling a request, sending invalid transactions, sending invalid blocks, or breaking some other consensus rule. To deal with these peers, Monero implements a strict security policy. The system drop connections and can

potentially takes further action. If the peer’s failure breaks a consensus rule (e.g. it sends transactions with invalid signatures) then it is assumed that other data sent from the peer may also be invalid. In some cases, the system counts failures for the hostname...

...associated with that peer and bans the hostname after a certain threshold. In other cases, like a block validation failure, the system deletes the rest of the blocks it has received from that peer and has not checked yet. These measures work to prevent denial-of-service attacks. For an example attack prevented by these mechanisms, consider a malicious node can send many invalid transactions and blocks to its peers with the goal

of causing its peers to waste time trying to validate incorrect information....

....If the peer’s failure seems to take the form of a liveness/availability issue, then the system often gives that node the benefit of the doubt and simply disconnects from the peer without banning it or deleting the data received. One example of such a failure is a RPC request that takes too long to complete."

moneroresearch.info/index.php?actio…n=resource_RESOURCEVIEW_CORE&id=132 Macias, & Siabi, Y. E. Security analysis of monero’s peer-to-peer system.

during sync it can happen that some of the peers are incorrectly blocked, it won't happen once your are fully synced

they should get automatically unblocked after a couple days

Fantastic, exactly what I was looking for, thank you. 👍️