Subject: Re: [Bitcoin-development] Service bits for pruned nodes

From: John Dillon <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 4 May 2013 18:07:42 +0000

I think you too should ask yourself why you are putting so much effort into
optimizing a centralized service, the DNS seeds, rather than putting effort
into optimizing the P2P peer discovery instead. DNS seeds are a necessary evil,
one that shouldn't be promoted with additional features beyond simply obtaining
your initial set of peers.

After all Peter, just like you have implemented alternate block header
distribution over twitter, in the future we should have many different means of
peer discovery. Right now we have DNS seeds, a fixed list, and IRC discovery
that does not work because the servers it was pointed too no longer exist. Not
a good place to be.

Some random ideas:

search engines - search for "bitcoin seed address" or something and try IP's
found (twitter is similar)

ipv4 scanning - not exactly friendly, but the density of bitcoin nodes is
probably getting to the point where a brute force search is feasible

anycast peers - would work best with UDP probably, who has the resources to set
this up?

It is probably not worth the effort implementing the above immediately, but it
is worth the effort to ensure that we don't make the DNS seed system so complex
and sophisticated that we depend on it.