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the tangle topology with clumping around milestones

In the Iota whitepaper the tangle is depicted as a uni-directional graph with a uniformly random set of connections between graph nodes. In the current implementation the true topology of the tangle does not represent that image. Instead we get a very clumpy tangle with the regular appearance of very popular nodes that get the lions share of conections. When these formations are present the confirmation rate is severley effected.

Why do these clumps form and will it be possible to remove them on the fiture?

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  • 4
    Very popular nodes are artifacts of attacks. Some adversaries like constructing "blowballs" to affect total confirmation rate, it's mainly their own transactions which are not confirmed because of that though.
    – Come-from-Beyond
    Jan 26, 2018 at 7:57
  • Also when people use badly connected nodes, all they see is the last milestone so they will attach their transactions to that one. Therefore the milestones are points where transactions "clump" around.
    – mihi ♦
    Jan 26, 2018 at 18:11
  • 2
    What are "blowballs"? Are they depicted by the image I attached? The popular nodes I see are always milestones, so that would suggest an algo problem rather than an attack. Would it be possible to implement a limit on number of total connections to one node?
    – Spamalot
    Jan 26, 2018 at 19:29
  • seems like all new tx reference the latest milestone in a crazy amount of cases
    – Werner der Champ
    Feb 5, 2018 at 19:45
  • Can someone make a nice answer for this question now?
    – Bayequentist
    Jul 25, 2018 at 23:45

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