Last week I introduced the world to a new library called P2PNet. A C++ library that allows developers to build a wide range of Bitcoin Cash related applications.

Working with a work-in-progress wallet quickly made me realize that the Bitcoin network is full of nodes that are not actually following the Bitcoin Cash chain. And this makes connecting to them less than useful.

Unfortunately the various seeds and standard way to exchange addresses in Bitcoin Cash are less than stellar and the result is a lot of waiting for useful peers to be found.

The decision was made: I will write a little application that crawls the network, checks peers for basic correctness and make the best ones available as a Flowee seed DNS entry.

The best part is that connecting to lots of nodes (9000 or so in the first 24 hours) was an excellent way to stress test the new P2PNet library. I can say that the library handles all of this very fast and gracefully. Making full usage of multiple cores.

The resulting crawler and seeder application connects briefly to each node and identifies itself as “Flowee-Seeder”. We check if a node is actually a Bitcoin Cash node and if they are behaving correctly. Every day the nodes with the best score are shared on the seed DNS ‘seed.flowee.cash’.

Wallets, full nodes and services are encouraged to use, test and report their thoughts below or on our gitlab issue tracker.

In Flowee we believe that the best way to benefit humanity is to get more people to use Bitcoin Cash. Use it in their normal daily lives. From getting wages in Bitcoin Cash to paying rent, water and groceries with it. All those people and companies need good bitcoin-cash infrastructure. Libraries and services. This is what Flowee is all about. We add more services and libraries on a regular basis. This is just the latest. Please check the website for more: flowee.org

Leading image by the yes man.