[Bitcoin-development] BIP: Custom Services

[Stefan Thomas <moon@justmoon.de>]

Hey everyone,

I was working on some custom protocol extensions for Bitcoin that I
wanted to experiment with and I noticed that in order to enable nodes to
announce these services the only mechanism the protocol currently
provides is to use one of the 64 bits of the services field. This is
obviously a resource that will run out quickly if we all just help
ourselves, so I set out to come up with a standardized way to announce
custom protocol extensions, without using up NODE_* flags.

Please kindly review my solution:

https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/User:Justmoon/BIP_Draft:_Custom_Services

Thanks to Amir Taaki, Mike Hearn and Pieter Wuille who provided
invaluable feedback while writing the draft.

Note: Earlier drafts of this BIP contained a description of a mechanism
for peer exchange for these custom services. However, since that part of
the BIP was (1) just a recommendation and (2) rather complex, Amir and I
agreed to split it off into a separate BIP [1] that will be refined some
more and submitted later.

Cheers,

Stefan

[1]
https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/User:Justmoon/BIP_Draft:_Custom_Service_Discovery