Subject: Re: [Bitcoin-development] Alert System

From: Steve Coughlan <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 9 Sep 2011 01:25:57 +1000

Who knows, it might be the only way we'll ever hear from Satoshi again.
On Sep 9, 2011 1:21 AM, "Matt Corallo" <[email-masked]> wrote:
> On Thu, 2011-09-08 at 07:42 -0700, David Perry wrote:
>> 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?
>
> The alert system requires a signature verification when it receives an
> alert, but so do blocks and transactions so it really isn't a DoS target
> (remember that the alert system requires alerts to be signed by a key
> that only gavin and satoshi have).
>
> The alert system could prove very, very valuable. In much software it
> carries the risk for abuse or simply seems wrong that the developers can
> send a message to everyone's computer to notify them of something, but
> keep in mind that Bitcoin is financial software. If there is an urgent
> problem (like the overflow bug) there must be a way to notify people to
> upgrade immediately, which is exactly what alerts provide. Since alerts
> no longer carry the ability to put Bitcoin into RPC safe-mode, they are
> literally just a message and I see no reason why they should be removed.
>
>
>
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