Re: [Bitcoin-development] About the small number of bitcoin nodes

[Mike Hearn <mike@plan99.net>]

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>
> (sure - there are tricks to limit rates anyway, like the script in
> contrib/qos, but to have it generally available the block download
> needs to be more robust first)


One thing we could consider as a short term solution (if headers
first+parallel downloading will take a while, which seems plausible) is to
add a service bit that says "I have chain data and am willing to Bloom
filter it for you, but I won't serve full block data", and then just
exclude all of those from the chain download logic. It should not be a deep
change to the code headers first is impacting, and would allow home users
who may have no tolerance for block chain uploads at all to still take part
and offer useful services to the network.

I know Pieter likes the idea of an "archival node" service bit, or
something like that. I'd been thinking that the stored chain height value
would be better, but perhaps we need to divorce "I have CPU and can filter"
from "I have bandwidth and can serve" more vigorously.

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