On IRC bootstrapping

Thanks soultcer for talking with the Freenode staffer.  Good to know it's OK at the current size, and now they know who we are.  They're supportive of projects like TOR so I hope they would probably be friendly to us.  We don't want to overstay our welcome.  If we get too big, then by the same token, we're big enough that we don't need IRC anymore and we'll get off.

We only needed IRC because nobody had a static IP.  In the early days there were some steady supporters, but they all had pool-allocated IPs that change every few days.  IRC was only intended as a temporary solution.  Bitcoin's built-in addr system is the main solution.

Bitcoin can get the list of IPs from any bitcoin node.  In that sense, every node serves as a directory server.

When there are enough static IP nodes to have a good chance that at least one will still be running by the time the current version goes out of use, we can preprogram a seed list.

How do you think we should compile the seed list?  Would it be OK to create it from the currently connected IPs that have been static for a while?

BTW, if we want to supplement by deploying separate directory server software, may I suggest IRC?  IRC is a good directory server (I've heard it has other uses too), and there are mature IRC server implementations available that anyone can run.   Bitcoin's IRC client implementation is already thoroughly tested.

The SVN version now uses IRC first and if that fails it falls back to a hardcoded list of seed nodes.  There are enough seed nodes now that many of them should still be up by the time of the next release.  It only briefly connects to a seed node to get the address list and then disconnects, so your connections drop back to zero for while.  At that point, be patient.  It's only slow to get connected the first time.

This means TOR users won't need to -addnode anymore, it'll get connected automatically.  

Everybody needs to connect to the same IRC server and channel so they can find each other.

It might not be good if we suddenly rushed freenode with a ton of users all at once.

The fallback is our own seed system.

irc.lfnet.org is pretty old and has impressive uptime.  I think it's going to be fine.

We could take IRC out at some point if we want, but I'd rather ease into it and just test our own seed system as a backup for now, and I really like the complementary redundant attributes of the two different systems.