Transaction

j"1LAnZuoQdcKCkpDBKQMCgziGMoPC4VQUckM¿<div class="post">I like the idea of distributed host caches like Gnutella uses. At the moment, for the majority of people, IRC is a single point of failure. Let's assume that for some reason our Freenode channel was gone. Maybe Freenode got fed up and shut us down. Maybe MenInBlack saw our system, laughed maniacally, and then pressured Freenode to shut us down.<br/><br/>When you start your client, it will do nothing. You could drop to a command line and type "-addnode" (or is it -peer? whatever) to connect to a known node, but at that point you'd somehow need to know a node. It probably wouldn't be that hard for one of us, but what about a new user? We could keep a list of peers on the website for them to use, but at that point, they've gone from "just double click the shiny gold coin and get trading" to "check our website for updated peer lists, open command prompt, navigated to the bitcoin directory, and type the proper peer....." And if MIB were after us, the website would probably be long since gone.<br/><br/>Of course, we could implement addpeer in a more user-friendly manner. Perhaps a popup that says "I can't connect to the network. Enter a peer: " with instructions on some ways to find one, but at that point we're creating a social solution to a technical problem.<br/><br/>Also, if we get bigger we will need to move away from IRC anyway (as implied by the OP's conversation with a Freenode staffer). And what about Tor users? Why should people who want to use Tor to be anonymous have to manually add a peer? <br/><br/>Finally, anyone on Freenode can easily get a list of all running Bitcoin clients, when they came online, when they went offline, etc. That goes against the project's stated goal of anonymity. Of course, with a host cache system, anybody who connected to that cache could be logged by the server operator, but no one operator would have a full picture of the network.<br/><br/>I think the IRC solution is a wonderful beginning, and I applaud how stable it has proven to be. It was a great decision to get the network up easily and concentrate on the more interesting and important considerations in the program. I just think that Bitcoin will outgrow it someday, if it hasn't already.</div> text/html