[Bitcoin-development] NODE_EXT_SERVICES and advertising related services

[Mike Hearn]

>
> Yes, that is the one change I am still pondering:  adding categories
> (classes), rather than one single bit.
>

Sure, that makes more sense I think.

As a motivating use case, Bitcoin Wallet for Android currently has a
hard-coded block explorer (biteasy.com) which it uses to find UTXOs for a
given key. This is used for its "Sweep paper wallet" feature. It must work
this way because P2P nodes don't calculate such indexes.

If there was a way to do block index autodiscovery, that'd help us remove
this hard-coded block explorer and increase decentralisation. But because
it's a GUI app we don't want users to look at a spinner for more than a few
seconds, so a slow discovery process would make it unworkable. With
API-based categories of service bits we could implement such a scheme.
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.linuxfoundation.org/pipermail/bitcoin-dev/attachments/20140808/8a4a778c/attachment.html>