Re: [Bitcoin-development] NODE_EXT_SERVICES and advertising related services

[Wladimir <laanwj@gmail.com>]

On Fri, Aug 8, 2014 at 12:15 PM, Wladimir <laanwj@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Fri, Aug 8, 2014 at 12:01 PM, Mike Hearn <mike@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