These nodes are much more likely to just be broken than malicious, but without any way to diagnose why they are dropping a transaction it's hard to find out what's really going on.

Anyway, yes, I need to spend time adding timeouts and all kinds of other things, although of course if the transactions are being rejected due to a change in network rules that won't help either - if the nodes you're connected to are silently eating your transaction, there's no sane UI that can result from that without more explicit error handling.

On Sun, Oct 27, 2013 at 3:39 PM, Luke-Jr <luke@dashjr.org> wrote:

On Sunday, October 27, 2013 2:32:57 PM Mike Hearn wrote:
> Currently bitcoinj gets a small but steady stream of bug reports of the form
> "my transaction did not propagate". It's flaky because the library picks one
> peer to send the transaction to, and then watches it propagate across the
> network. But if that selected peer refuses the tx for whatever reason, that
> propagation never comes, and there's currently no timeout to make it retry
> with a different node.

Sounds like the real bug is "BitcoinJ relies on good/servant behaviour from
other nodes". Don't assume your random node isn't hostile. Handling a peer
that doesn't relay your transaction for any reason (including if they lie to
you about having done so) should be expected behaviour.

Luke