My take was that what Matt is doing is very cool and when blocks are several MB in size something like this or Gavin's alternative proposal for eliminating retransmission of transactions with every block will be important.
For me, each of my nodes has a connection which p2pool and bitcoind never come close to utilising. So I didn't think the block size was a particularly big deal at the moment from a speed perspective. Don't know if that's been actively researched.
If Matt's built it and it works then I see no reason not to connect to one of his nodes to gain the benefit of it.
I'll be adding Coin Cadence to his east coast relay on the next restart.
If you are running bitcoin-qt, you don't need to wait for a restart - you can just type:
addnode public.us-east.relay.mattcorallo.com add
in the debug console.
Thanks.
From my brief bit of experimentation, the above doesn't work. It looks like you can't connect bitcoind directly to the Relay Network. You need to run RelayNodeClient which connects to the Relay Network and your local bitcoind.
So you would do:
java -jar RelayNodeClient.jar public.us-east.relay.mattcorallo.com 127.0.0.1:8333
That worked for me and I saw transactions and blocks passed to my bitcoind. Then you'd just have to get the RelayNodeClient application running in a persistent way (upon startup, with a watchdog, etc.). That will vary based on your operating system. I'll be getting a systemd unit file ready to run on CentOS 7, which is what my node uses. If anyone's interested, I'd be happy to share it.
My bad - you do have to specify port 8335 - but you don't need to use anything but bitcoin-qt, as others have already related above.