Quote from: hellwig on July 04, 2011, 07:15:42 PM

While I am quietly in my limited spare time building a python implementation of the bitcoin protocol I am increasingly charmed about the ingenuity of the protocol itself.
Sure in the beginning I had of a lot of things* that I found strange but what is even stranger is that I am continuously discovering that the choices made might not be pretty, or particular easy but they share one common trait so far; the alternatives have far worse implications**.

Great!

It would be nice if you could write notes about what you discover. AFAIK, the protocol is only partially documented and mostly resides in "oral tradition" (if I may say so it's obviously not oral). You could e.g. contribute to the Protocol specification page on the wiki, that still has strong tying between the network protocol and the internal structure of the original implementation (see "variable length strings", data types all over the document, etc.).

This is not a criticism. It's normal at this stage of history (the same happened with jabber/jabberd at the beginning), but an implementation-agnostic, RFC-like document is necessary if we want Bitcoin to succeed as an internet protocol, not just a program.

(Also, it's "once", not "ones".)