Isn't the IRC channel used for bootstrapping a single point of failure? Wouldn't the loss of this channel result in an inability for new clients to connect?
A new client installation attempts to bootstrap from IRC but if that fails, then a hard-coded list of seed nodes in the client is used.
Additionally, there is a -dnsseed command line argument which causes bitcoin to read P2P node addresses from DNS A records retrieved via lookups against a precompiled list of DNS names.
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http://forum.bitcoin.org/?topic=4313.0A vulnerability from "cancer nodes" is described here:
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http://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Weaknesses#Cancer_nodes