[Bitcoin-development] NODE_EXT_SERVICES and advertising related services

[Christian Decker]

I wonder whether we actually want to support this kind of advertisement in
the P2P protocol. We have a working mechanism for protocol extensions in
the P2P network (service flags) so this is obviously only for services that
are not P2P extensions, so why have them in there at all?

I'd argue that a parallel network, external to Bitcoin, could take over the
task of advertising external services.

Regards,
Chris

--
Christian Decker


On Fri, Aug 8, 2014 at 11:26 AM, Wladimir <laanwj at gmail.com> wrote:

> On Fri, Aug 8, 2014 at 12:15 PM, Wladimir <laanwj at gmail.com> wrote:
> > On Fri, Aug 8, 2014 at 12:01 PM, Mike Hearn <mike at plan99.net> wrote:
> >>> He wants to use it to advertise services that are not part of the P2P
> >>> protocol itself, but run on a different port. Reserving services bits
> >>> for those is not acceptable.
> >>
> >>
> >> Why not? Does the port matter much?
> >
> > Yes. The services bits are for advertising services on the P2P
> > network. That's not open for discussion.
>
> It also wouldn't work. A bit is not enough to find an external service
> except in the naive case where the advertised service would have a
> fixed port. Not even bitcoind has a fixed port. So there needs to be a
> mechanism to find how to connect to the 'external service'. This is
> provided by the proposed extension.
>
> It would in principle be possible to advertise an extra service bit
> *in addition to* this one, to make it easier to find through the addr
> mechanism. But it  would be confusing and IMO an abuse of P2P service
> bits.
>
> Wladimir
>
>
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