Currently, connections are made to nodes which don't share the first two octets of the IP address, which raises the bar for attackers who are trying to prevent knowledge of blocks or transactions from spreading through the network. But adopting a more complete metric for distance could further minimize the chance of being fenced in due to only connecting to untrustworthy nodes.

The Kademlia protocol uses the XOR metric to determine the distance between two IP addresses. Applied to Bitcoin, a variant of the XOR metric might be to attempt to connect to the farthest node from the joining address in each k-bucket: aka, one node that has a particular bit of its IP address set, for a total of 32 buckets (or 128 for IPv6).