I think there's a significant risk to not having it at this stage.
There's many reasons why an urgent update may been to rapidly propagated
in this stage of the network's lifecycle. Perhaps if there's a
perceived threat of abuse the protocol could be altered slightly so it
can't carry content. Only a notification of the fact that there is an
alert. Then it would be up to individual clients whether they react to
it or not. The main clients would probably check a central trusted
server for actual alert content. This would give a lot more flexibility
in how to deal with the alert. Alert content servers could for example
implement a json api to provide alert content with meta data like target
client version, priority etc.
I think it should be removed in the future but not for a good while yet.
On 09/09/11 00:42, David Perry wrote:
There has been some discussion on the new Bitcoin StackExchange
<http://bitcoin.stackexchange.com> site lately about the alert
protocol. A few have suggested that it might carry the potential for
abuse (spam/DoS) and others have argued that it's merely deprecated.
In any case, enough have voiced concerns that I've forked
bitcoin/bitcoin, removed the snippet of code from main.cpp that makes
the questionable call and submitted a pull request
<https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/pull/506>. On that pull request it
was noted by Gavin Andresen that it merited discussion here and some
kind of consensus should be reached before acting on that pull
request. It was also mentioned that he thought the feature was still
more useful than dangerous and that he would argue against.
So I pose the question to you fine fellows: Is the alert system
valuable, an unnecessary risk or merely a snippet of deprecated code?
Should it be removed?
Sources:
http://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/583/what-is-the-alert-system-in-the-bitcoin-protocol-how-does-it-work/590
http://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/636/is-the-alert-system-still-in-the-main-clients-code-will-it-be-removed/711
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