Mike Hearn has been lobbying for an "error" message in the Bitcoin p2p protocol for years (at least since the "ban peers if they send us garbage" denial-of-service mitigation code was pull-requested). This came up again with my proposed "smartfee" changes, which would drop low-priority or low-fee transactions.

In short, giving peers feedback about why their blocks or transactions are dropped or why they are being banned should help interoperability between different implementations, and will give SPV (simplified payment verification) clients feedback when their transactions are rejected due to insufficient priority or fees.

See the gist for details, I'm looking for feedback and planning on implementing this before circling back to finish the 'smart fee' work:

   https://gist.github.com/gavinandresen/7079034

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Gavin Andresen