If gossip works by picking 3 random nodes to share transactions with if an attacker owns 1000 out of 1010 nodes they will very likely be the only one who transactions get shared to.
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.
>Sybilling users, will be forced (statistically) to reveal their excess hops.
There are no excess hops in the attack I am describing.
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.
Yes, please scroll up. Two different attacks were explained along with saying this article only solves one of them.
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...
Do you have any specific critiques? I'm not going to guess your meaning if you aren't going to address my points directly.
And even then they could not orphan the work produced by other nodes profitably, which would be possible in POW and POS. So at best you have an inefficient strategy for maximizing routing work, but no profitable attack based on it and a strong incentive to behave honestly even if you have a majority of work.