Bitcoin Forum

now im ignorant to running a p2p currency. so if the answer is nothing weird. my apologies for even bringing it up. but being invested i deserve a answer and couldnt find anything using search.

Now in very vague terms i was looking at the code sending and receiving from the client. and i seen it connect to giraffe.heliacal.net . i thought hmm strange. went to it and found it to be connect to the personal site of some dude who codes and whatnot. turns out its the personal site of Laszlo Hanyecz. one the creators found of the main page. Now im under the impression that bitcoin was decentralized and ran from users computers. why does it need to go to any website yet alone a strangely named blank directory of one of the creators personal sites?

now this has only connected to his site once so far and ive checked about 10,000+ codes.

does this comprimise its decentralized nature? why would it connect to that site?

tl;dr - wut giraffe.heliacal.net do?

giraffe.heliacal.net is also known as irc.lfnet.org

Laszlo runs that IRC chat server, and bitcoin uses it to "bootstrap" to find other machines running bitcoin.

Unless you run with the -noirc switch, in which case it won't -- it will try to connect via a list of compiled-in 'seed nodes' (which I'll try really hard to remember to recruit somebody to update for the next release).

After you've run bitcoin once, it stores nodes you were able to connect with in the addr.dat file, so you can run -noirc just fine.  But if everybody did that, newbies who just downloaded bitcoin would have a hard time finding people to connect with.

They keep eight (?) network nodes up in case you don't have other peers (such as when you first start the app).  It is sort of a home base to go look for peers on the P2P network.  Soon after you should connect to other peers (just like you) and find more peers from them and so on.  There has to be some place to go to say, here I am and where do I go next.   

If the "home nodes" go down (say government intervention), a new site could be hosted and the software source reconfigured if necessary to look at the new "home" location.  There is no authority.  If you are looking at the code then you should see this for yourself.

When you hear or read discussion of a central authority, that is comparable to the federal reserve and there is nothing like that with Bitcoin and there can not be without software change and everybody agreeing to use it (which they never will ... old clients simply wouldn't work with modified protocol).

EDIT: The previous poster beat me too it.  The software doesn't use nodes, but rather it uses a hosted IRC server for "Home".  Same principal applies however.  Well, I guess there are compiled in nodes which is what I was originally referred to, but I was unaware that IRC was the first course of action).

thanks for the response. lookin fly in forbes gavin! really didnt expect you to post a reply here. thanks for explaining!

Why do we not simply use the default irc.lfnet.org?

Could we perhaps use a .bit domain in the future?