There has been some discussion on the new Bitcoin StackExchange site lately about the alert protocol. A few have suggested that it might carry the potential for abuse (spam/DoS) and others have argued that it's merely deprecated. In any case, enough have voiced concerns that I've forked bitcoin/bitcoin, removed the snippet of code from main.cpp that makes the questionable call and submitted a pull request. On that pull request it was noted by Gavin Andresen that it merited discussion here and some kind of consensus should be reached before acting on that pull request. It was also mentioned that he thought the feature was still more useful than dangerous and that he would argue against.
So I pose the question to you fine fellows: Is the alert system valuable, an unnecessary risk or merely a snippet of deprecated code? Should it be removed?
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