[Bitcoin-development] Alert System

[David Perry]

There has been some discussion on the new Bitcoin
StackExchange<http://bitcoin.stackexchange.com>site lately about the
alert protocol. A few have suggested that it might
carry the potential for abuse (spam/DoS) and others have argued that it's
merely deprecated. In any case, enough have voiced concerns that I've forked
bitcoin/bitcoin, removed the snippet of code from main.cpp that makes the
questionable call and submitted a pull
request<https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/pull/506>.
On that pull request it was noted by Gavin Andresen that it merited
discussion here and some kind of consensus should be reached before acting
on that pull request. It was also mentioned that he thought the feature was
still more useful than dangerous and that he would argue against.

So I pose the question to you fine fellows: Is the alert system valuable, an
unnecessary risk or merely a snippet of deprecated code? Should it be
removed?

Sources:
http://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/583/what-is-the-alert-system-in-the-bitcoin-protocol-how-does-it-work/590
http://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/636/is-the-alert-system-still-in-the-main-clients-code-will-it-be-removed/711
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