BIP 0014 - Protocol Version and User Agent

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Data sheet for Protocol Version and User Agent

Title	Protocol Version and User Agent
Layer	Peer Services
Author	Amir Taaki, Patrick Strateman
Comments-Summary	No comments yet.
Comments-URI	https://github.com/bitcoin/bips/wiki/Comments:BIP-0014
Staus	Final
Type	Standards Track
Created	2011-11-10
Post History	2011-11-02
Description	https://github.com/bitcoin/bips/blob/master/bip-0014.mediawiki

: Note: The following is an excerpt from the official Bitcoin site. It is provided here as a connivence and is not authoritative. Refer to the original document(s) as the authoritative reference.

* * * NOTE * * *
n this document, bitcoin will be used to refer to the protocol while Satoshi will refer to the current client in order to prevent confusion.

Proposal

The version field in version and getblocks packets will become the protocol version number. The version number in the “blocks” reflects the protocol version from when that block was created.The currently unused sub_version_num field in version packets will become the new user-agent string.Bitcoin user agents are a modified browser user agent with more structure to aid parsers and provide some coherence. In bitcoin, the software usually works like a stack starting from the core code-base up to the end graphical interface. Therefore the user agent strings codify this relationship.Basic format:

/Name:Version/Name:Version/.../

Example:

/Satoshi:5.64/bitcoin-qt:0.4/
/Satoshi:5.12/Spesmilo:0.8/