[bitcoin-dev] Generalizing feature negotiation when new p2p connections are setup

Eric Voskuil eric at voskuil.org
Fri Aug 21 16:42:46 UTC 2020


I’m pretty sure one can run whatever they want even without a BIP. There is nobody here to do any “allowing”. On the other hand, standards development is tedious for good reason.

Generally speaking, overloading is a primary source of complexity (creating more branches in code and human explanation). Nevertheless this is verack payload, no additional messages are necessary or helpful.

e

> On Aug 21, 2020, at 07:15, Matt Corallo via bitcoin-dev <bitcoin-dev at lists.linuxfoundation.org> wrote:
> 
> Sure, we could do a new message for negotiation, but there doesn’t seem to be a lot of reason for it - using the same namespace for negotiation seems fine too. In any case, this is one of those things that doesn’t matter in the slightest, and if one person volunteers to write a BIP and code, no reason they shouldn’t just decide and be allowed to run with it. Rough consensus and running code, as it were :)
> 
> Matt
> 
> 
>>> On Aug 20, 2020, at 22:37, Anthony Towns via bitcoin-dev <bitcoin-dev at lists.linuxfoundation.org> wrote:
>>> 
>>> On Fri, Aug 14, 2020 at 03:28:41PM -0400, Suhas Daftuar via bitcoin-dev wrote:
>>> In thinking about the mechanism used there, I thought it would be helpful to
>>> codify in a BIP the idea that Bitcoin network clients should ignore unknown
>>> messages received before a VERACK.  A draft of my proposal is available here
>>> [2].
>> 
>> Rather than allowing arbitrary messages, maybe it would make sense to
>> have a specific feature negotiation message, eg:
>> 
>> VERSION ...
>> FEATURE wtxidrelay
>> FEATURE packagerelay
>> VERACK
>> 
>> with the behaviour being that it's valid only between VERSION and VERACK,
>> and it takes a length-prefixed-string giving the feature name, optional
>> additional data, and if the feature name isn't recognised the message
>> is ignored.
>> 
>> If we were to support a "polite disconnect" feature like Jeremy suggested,
>> it might be easier to do that for a generic FEATURE message, than
>> reimplement it for the message proposed by each new feature.
>> 
>> Cheers,
>> aj
>> 
>> _______________________________________________
>> bitcoin-dev mailing list
>> bitcoin-dev at lists.linuxfoundation.org
>> https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/mailman/listinfo/bitcoin-dev
> _______________________________________________
> bitcoin-dev mailing list
> bitcoin-dev at lists.linuxfoundation.org
> https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/mailman/listinfo/bitcoin-dev


More information about the bitcoin-dev mailing list