Transaction

j"1LAnZuoQdcKCkpDBKQMCgziGMoPC4VQUckMÑ<div class="post">We all talk about bootstrapping systems, how ever, my idea might be a bit better.<br/><br/>A user starts bitcoin on a host for the first time, and it will initially download a list of nodes that it will connect to.<br/>(until, of course, we have a lot of static nodes we can hard code into bitcoin...)<br/>Then, the client tries to connects to those IPs on that list it downloaded, or when it already has a list downloaded from the last time it started bitcoin, connect to those.<br/>When we're connected, the client asks every node for a list of nodes they know and updates its node list.<br/>Once a complete list is obtained, it is saved on the hard drive and a copy is kept in memory. (This is because we want to have a list of nodes without actually connect to that indexing server.)<br/>And finally, the node is completely connected to the network.<br/>When a new node connects (when it receives a "new node packet"), the list is both updated in memory and saved to the hard drive again.<br/>To make updating the list with new nodes so bandwidth friendly as possible, I suggest that every node "echoes" the IP of a new node connecting to the network to all the nodes it knows...<br/><br/>Pros:<br/>* Has bootstrapping in mind.<br/>* Is distributed for clients that have a node list<br/><br/>Cons:<br/>* Every new client needs to connect to a server to get a new node list until we're done with bootstrapping.<br/><br/>This, in my eyes, seems like the best solution to our bootstrapping problem...<br/>PS: If we implement this, we might just wanna check if the "new node packet" we received contains bogus IPs, or IPs that resolve to .gov domains! <img alt="Tongue" border="0" src="/static/img/emoticons/tongue.gif"/></div> text/html