Consider moving back to #bitcoin for IRC bootstrap #1143

Now that IRC is non-default, any remaining irc=1 users will have difficulty finding each other among 100 increasingly unused channels.

Consider backing out the #bitcoin{00-99} change, and go back to #bitcoin.

But then IRC would break if users turned it on at large scale due to some problem with dnsseeding.

I instead propose something like this patch I've been carrying for a while https://people.xiph.org/~greg/irc-suckless.patch

The idea here is that if nodes have evidence that their listening is working, they randomly join two channels which they periodically hop. Nodes which are not listening join only one channel and get off irc after they have collected peers and have connections.

If anyone else likes this idea I can go ahead and merge it— I was last working on it when we decided to just turn off IRC... with IRC off it seemed less important.

I like the IRC channel-hopping idea, although supporting old clients having trouble finding peers because none of other seeding options is working for them is so far down the priority list I'm not sure it's worth the effort.

If we hadn't decided to deprecate IRC, that should have been merged for sure. Maybe there's some way for checking how many nodes are in the channels, and based on that join more or less? Probably not worth the effort anymore though.

Hardly related: in #1141 (i should split it off) I added a "-seednode" option, which causes a one-shot connection to the given nodes, and disconnect after receiving a list of peers.

Or maybe a community volunteer could connect to all channels

Luke connects to all the channels already. It's complicated a bit by the fact that it only allows joining 25 channels per connection, he has some local patch that connects multiple times.

Thought thats not quite enough— for some reason the lfnet ircservers don't return all clients in the /who result — and nodes only /who once on connect. The actual join messages are the only way to get noticed by everyone in the room. So even if your goal is to just be in all the channels, you're still better off joining just half and randomly hopping.

Joining more or less based on something wouldn't take much work, I just don't know if we have anything great to base that decision on.