Today asciilifeform of No Such lAbs offered for review a patch to the reference Bitcoin Client that spares full node operators the burden of having to handle connections from parasitic SPV clients making Bloom filter requests. This complements other recent work on the reference Bitcoin client to promote communion among Bitcoin full nodes absent distractions presented by various things that are not other full nodes. When a node running this patch receives a bloom filter request the debug.log entry looks like:
Misbehaving: 156.33.241.17:8333 (0 -> 100) DISCONNECTING
disconnecting node 156.33.241.17:8333
ERROR: BANNED peer issuing heathen command.
ProcessMessage(reject, 66 bytes) FAILED
Persons utilizing bloom filter based SPV clients are advised to run their own trusted full node so that they can guarantee at least one full node on the Bitcoin network is working for them.1 Meanwhile full node operators now have a short legible patch that relieves them of one network nuisance introduced by Mike Hearn.
The entire point of running a full node is not to "help the network" or any other bullshit. It is for YOUR own benefit. Whether you use its wallet functionality or some other wallet, operating a full node means YOU have a point under your control that validates the blockchain which you may query as you need or desire. Having you own full nodes means you get to subject it to all sorts of demands that other people's full nodes are under no obligation to entertain. ↩
Obviously the solution here is to make it even harder to run a fully-validating node by bloating the blockchain with even bigger blocks.