Hi all.

Just wanted to carry the discussion from the Forum over to the dev-list.

We have quite a few bootstrapping mechanisms, starting with the overly
complex (IMHO) IRC bootstrapping, which is often suspected as bot-activity.
Then we have a few hardcoded nodes and some fallback nodes. I was wondering
why we didn't adopt BitTorrent tracker bootstrapping until now? It's
basically all it does. Given a hash (SHA1 hash of the genesis bloc would be
nice ^^) it gives you a list of other nodes with the same hash.

Given that there are quite a few open trackers (accepting and tracking any
hash you throw at them) we could just decide to use 2-3 of those to
bootstrap.

The downside would be that they return bencoded data, which has to be
interpreted first, but it's easier than implementing the IRC stuff, I think.

Any comments?

Regards,
Chris