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Title: bootstraping? Post by: schone on April 26, 2011, 05:24:58 PM Hello,
I'm relatively new to the bitcoin community but have a programming background as well as linux server experience. Was wondering if bitcoin still uses the IRC freenode channel to bootstrap and if so maybe we can brainstorm and come up with an even better solution that will be scalable and not single point dependent? Thanks PS To Moderators: I'm sorry but i put another thread like this in technical support only to realize this section exists. Title: Re: bootstraping? Post by: MoonShadow on April 26, 2011, 08:12:14 PM The IRC channel is still in use, but it is no longer a critical part of bootstrapping. It makes it easier for a fresh install to identify peers to connect to, but if IRC is unreachable for any reason, it will use an internal list of IP addresses of known, persistant peers to bootstrap with. Further peers can be identifed over the network protocol, and whenever Bitcoin shuts down it saves a list of it's most recent peers and attempts to reconnect to those peers upon startup. Without IRC, initial bootstrapping can take a long time, because the client is not only starved of peer links but is also trying to aquire the blockchain and hash it all as it goes. I've done it this way, and it's a tad faster to force the client to connect to a major known peer.
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