Hi Everyone,

Reading a bit about the bootstrapping[1] of the P2P protocol, I was wondering
why the client is not including by default a HTTP bootstrap as an alternative to IRC (often
IRC is blocked or some antivirus/anti-malware products tag the Bitcoin application
to be suspicious just because of the IRC traffic).

For the test, I setup a page where I publish the IP seen by my Bitcoin client:

http://btc.fo.vc/ (accessible in IPv4 and IPv6[2])

The IP addresses are collected with a simple script like this:

netstat -an | grep 8333 | grep ESTA | awk '{print $5}' | cut -f1,2,3,4 -d"." > /tmp/bitcoin
(date | awk '{print "# " $0 " Bitcoin clients seen"}') >>/tmp/bitcoin

and push on the remote server.

Until now, I didn't dig into the code of Bitcoin but I suppose including an alternative
bootstrap to the IRC  (and 8333) is not something unrealistic.

Let me know what you think.

adulau

[1] http://www.bitcoin.org/wiki/doku.php?id=network
[2] We never know, maybe Bitcoin will support IPv6 in the future