Author: Jeff Garzik 2014-08-08 11:22:46
Published on: 2014-08-08T11:22:46+00:00
The email conversation is regarding a proposal to advertise external services which are not part of the P2P protocol and run on a different port. Christian Decker argues that this kind of advertisement should not be supported in the P2P protocol as we already have a working mechanism for protocol extensions in the P2P network (service flags). Wladimir says that a bit is not enough to find an external service except in cases where the advertised service would have a fixed port. Since bitcoind does not have a fixed port, there needs to be a mechanism to find how to connect to the 'external service'. This is provided by the proposed extension. It would be possible to advertise an extra service bit in addition to this one to make it easier to find through the addr mechanism. However, it would be confusing and an abuse of P2P service bits. Jeff Garzik, a bitcoin core developer and open source evangelist, also appears in the conversation. The focus of NODE_EXT_SERVICES is tightly on services that exist if any only if a P2P bitcoin node (bitcoind) is reachable via the same advertised address and can be used to create overlay networks of specialized services.
Updated on: 2023-06-09T02:02:06.841157+00:00