>
> Although Pieter and I disagree with regard to issue #4351, we agree on
> wanting to keep (or at least making) bitcoind as lean as possible.
> Maintaining extra indices for others doesn't fit in there - that's
> also why the address index patch was not merged. An 'index node' could
> be a different animal.


We definitely want to head in the direction of allowing a p2p node to be as
useful as possible within its resource constraints and optional advertising
of new (expensive) indexes is the way to go.

Sometimes I wonder if we should have an RPC or new socket based method
where additional programs could run along side Bitcoin Core and opt to
handle a subset of p2p commands. But then I think, that seems like a lot of
complexity for people who just want to help out the system, which I guess
is the bulk of our network now. Keeping their lives simple should have a
high priority. So a single unified program that just figures it out
automatically rather than expecting users to assemble a bag of parts seems
a goal worth striving for.