Bitcoin Forum

Some more stupid questions:

It says here: Bitcoin is administered through a decentralized peer-to-peer network. Now on the other hand side I read that most Bitcoin nodes are constantly connected to this channel ( irc.lfnet.org) while running. So this means actually the client is not a decentralized peer-to-peer network.
Hence my questions:

1. Is it possible the client is connecting to a dedicated server without someone knowing?
2. Is it possible even the client is "open source" there are some hidden programms running in the background?
3. It it possible there is a central point like (irc.lfnet.org) where all information (transactions etc. ) are collected and analysed ?

Thanks
Please dont reply to this question if you get angry about stupid questions....
 

This was removed awhile ago, bitcoin-qt and bitcoind doesn't use IRC to find peers.

I see, thanks

I really hate to blow the dust off this older than dirt thread but I have a question that pertains to the topic.

Why was this implementation removed? Was it because it made bitcoin more centralized?

Another question, considering this was implemented into another coin, you could potentially get the ip of all people currently on the network either mining or wallet open by decoding the nicks?

The only reason I ask this question is the possible implementation of this feature in a coin that would be able to map out all users on the network.

Yes if the irc channel went down, it would take peer discovery down as well.


I forgot how the implementation worked, but yes in theory.


Yes you could, but even with the current peer discovery you can map most of the nodes on the network.

First I would like to thank you for actually replying, I see you were the one who initially answered the OP and its been more than 2 years since this was first opened.


So this question isn't just a question for the sake of general knowledge but for utilization. A little background. There is a Geospatial related coin that is set to implement GEO related features. One of the features that would be nice to impliment would be the mapping of all users by city, state, country and what not. I am not the dev but an in the GEO field and would like to help as much as possible, even if the coin becomes a flop, the idea can still be dedicated elsewhere.

Can the operation of peer discover be split between the 2 operations? If one went down there would always be current discovery.


Current Peer discovery seems to only map out nodes but not individual ips interacting. If there is another way to pull the information that is much more than nodes, do you know a way?

Or can just use the current peer discovery, and setup a website, which nodes hit on startup and on shutdown. If you just want to track nodes.


You would be better off writing a crawler to do that. Then relaying on the bitcoin-core to do it, but you can pull ips in bitcoin-core as well.


will return information.