Re: [Bitcoin-development] Bootstrapping via BitTorrent trackers

[Vladimir Marchenko <vladimir@marchenko.co.uk>]

Jeff is absolutely correct, stating that DNS bootstrapping can
potentially be very robust.

Consider, for example, that seeds can be hosted by services like
zerigo, who provide decent management API's, as well as by thousands
of small VPS operated by people all over the world. Moreover, if
namecoin lives up to it's promises than some seeds can be hosted using
it's tlds, and as such we would get around centralised ICANN/registrar
weakness.

The most practical way I see how to improve DNS bootstrapping is
publishing build instructions for a simple DNS server build and a
script which feeds it with node data. Something simple like djbdns plus
a perl script, or similar zerigo API script, would do. Than anyone can
host it. All left to do than is to hardcode a bunch of such DNS seeds
into the client.

Hardcoding seeds is not good enough? Get a convention that anyone
owning a bitcoin.* domain should point seed.bitcoin.* to a decent DNS
seed. Than clients simply scan 100-200 tld's to find working
seed.bitcoin.*

I am not quite sure, though, is if this would enable some attacks by
poisoned seeds.

Vladimir.