For my replace-by-fee implementation(1) I used service bit 26 to let preferential peering work so that replace-by-fee nodes could easily find each other. Of course, that's a temporary/experimental usage that can be dropped after wider adoption, so I included the following comment: // Reserve 24-31 for temporary experiments NODE_REPLACE_BY_FEE = (1 << 26) Service bits are never a guaranteed thing anyway, so occasional collisions can and should be tolerated by applications using these experimental service bits. Alternately Wladimir J. van der Laan brought up elsewhere(2) the possibility for a wider notion of an extension namespace. I'm personally not convinced of the short-term need - we've got 64 service bits yet NODE_BLOOM is the first fully fleshed out proposal to use one - but it's worth thinking about for the long term. 1) https://github.com/petertodd/bitcoin/tree/replace-by-fee-v0.9.1 2) https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/pull/4351#issuecomment-46272958 -- 'peter'[:-1]@petertodd.org 000000000000000058ca7ee3a40438ea5a96e499910638352468c6d69abdb226