We’ve talked about feature bits before. They are bits that nodes look for in other nodes communication to check if they support a certain feature they’re looking to use.

A proposal was suggested by developer Rusty Russels with a few amends to the implementation of feature bits. It consists of renaming local features to peer features and global features to routing features and having them share a number space so they don’t overlap. Then we can put both ‘features’ in node announcements but never using even bits for peer features.

This facilitates using node_announcement as both connecting to a peer that supports a certain feature and asking the question “can I route through this node?”. Further discussions are available on the mailing list here.