Subject: Re: [Bitcoin-development] Adding request/reply id in messages

From: Pieter Wuille <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 12 Apr 2012 18:01:54 +0200

On Thu, Apr 12, 2012 at 11:41:05AM -0400, Gavin Andresen wrote:
> On Wed, Apr 11, 2012 at 2:39 PM, Christian Bodt <[email-masked]> wrote:
> > I would like to discuss the following bitcoin protocol improvement proposal:
> >
> >          Adding request/reply id in all messages (in the message header,
> > based on what was done for the "checksum" field)
> 
> That seems like a perfectly reasonable protocol improvement to me.
> Anybody else have an opinion?

If there is a reasonable use for it, I have no objections.

However: the bitcoin P2P protocol is not fully request-reply based, and trying to use
it that may be be less intuitive than how it looks. For example, doing a second
identical "getblocks" request will not result in more "inv" replies, as the client
prevents retransmits. This is not a large problem, but maybe such an extension
should also include an extra "denied" message, which is sent if the client is
unwilling to answer (and may also be used to report transactions that are not
accepted into the memory pool, for example).

-- 
Pieter