I'm cautious of using human-meaningful identifiers, especially any that might require a central repository, due to name collisions. Examples that could be complicated include BitcoinDark, Litedoge, and other names that base on existing coins. I think the ability to differentiate between test networks is also useful.

Could certainly just use the genesis hash as network ID, that would work. Bit long, but suspect 64 bytes isn't the end of the world! I'll see if any more responses come in then raise a BIP for using genesis hash as an alternative to short names.

Ross

On 09/08/2015 15:29, Mike Hearn wrote:

I'd appreciate initial feedback on the idea, and if there's no major objections I'll raise this as a BIP.

The reason BIP 70 doesn't do this is the assumption that alt coins are ... well .... alt. They can vary in arbitrary ways from Bitcoin, and so things in BIP70 that work for Bitcoin may or may not work for other coins.

If your alt coin is close enough to BIP 70 that you can reuse it "as is" then IMO we should just define a new network string for your alt. network = "dogecoin-main" or whatever.

You could also use the genesis hash as the network name. That works too. But it's less clear and would involve lookups to figure out what the request is for, if you find such a request in the wild. I don't care much either way.

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