Re: [Bitcoin-development] BIP: Custom Services

[Mike Hearn <mike@plan99.net>]

I think it's pretty reasonable, although people will want to use node
flags to get into the addr broadcasts anyway.

That said, I suspect (based on previous discussions) that there would
be quite some pushback against putting extra functionality into the
core Bitcoin network. Most likely people will re-use the code with
different peer discovery seeds and bootstrap similar but unrelated P2P
networks for doing new applications.

For instance, what if we want to do the language translation app I've
talked about a few times before? You need a way to floodfill broadcast
invalid transactions to interested parties. The pubsub mechanism in
the Bitcoin protocol was an interesting way to do that, but I think it
got removed. To broadcast to interested nodes now, you'd have to find
them via addr broadcasts and then connect directly. And if you're
going to do that, you may as well just form an entirely independent
network.

More elaboration of the use cases might therefore be useful.