[Bitcoin-development] Bootstrapping via BitTorrent trackers

[Jeff Garzik]

On Mon, Jun 13, 2011 at 7:48 AM, Christian Decker
<decker.christian at gmail.com> wrote:
> The advantages over IRC and DNS Seeds are:
>  - sporadic HTTP requests to a tracker, as opposed to keeping an IRC
> connection open at all times

No advantage over DNS (you're talking about IRC)

>  - no virus/botnet like behaviour (automatically join IRC channel with
> cryptic name), ISPs tend to bother network admins (like myself) with alerts
> when they see this...

No advantage over DNS (you're talking about IRC)

>  - adapts faster than DNS Seeds which require configuration changes on seed
> should the nodes become unreachable

False.  A proper DNS seed actively samples the bitcoin network for live nodes.

>  - we already use HTTP to determine our external IP, so it would be a
> consolidation of transports

Irrelevant -- it's still a bunch of additional code.  We "already use"
DNS lookups as well, so I could apply similar logic to DNS seeding.

>  - more peers than DNS Seeds (better load balancing)

This is an invalid assumption, based on an overly simplistic sampling.
 DNS seeds are perfectly capable of returning new and useful peers on
each query.

-- 
Jeff Garzik
exMULTI, Inc.
jgarzik at exmulti.com