Subject: Re: [Bitcoin-development] Proposal: allocate 8 service bits for experimental use

From: Wladimir <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 17 Jun 2014 09:57:35 +0200

On Tue, Jun 17, 2014 at 9:23 AM, Peter Todd <[email-masked]> wrote:

> 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

Yes, as I said in the github topic
(https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/pull/4351) I suggest we adapt a
string-based name space for extensions.

A new network version could add a command 'getextensions' to query the
supported extensions, returning a list of extension strings or
(extension,version) pairs. For BIPs some something like 'BIP0064'
could be defined, but for an experiment for example
'experimental-getutxo'. This would be easy to implement and specify.

Unlike with the 64 service bits it does not require (as much) central
coordination to assign as there is no real danger of collisions. It
takes the political aspect out of P2P network extensions, and gives
more freedom to alternative implementations to experiment with their
own extensions. And no more need for bitcoin core to drive what must
be supported with increasing network versions.

Wladimir