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Bootnodes are supposed to act as entry points for new nodes into the Ethereum network. How many such bootnodes are hard-coded into Ethereum clients?

Also, Who maintains these bootnodes and what happens if they stop functioning?

P.S. An year ago, it was mentioned that there are 3 hard-coded bootnodes.

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Have a look in bootnodes.go. It's still 3 for the Geth clients:

// ETH/DEV Go Bootnodes
discover.MustParseNode("enode://a979fb575495b8d6db44f750317d0f4622bf4c2aa3365d6af7c284339968eef29b69ad0dce72a4d8db5ebb4968de0e3bec910127f134779fbcb0cb6d3331163c@52.16.188.185:30303"), // IE
discover.MustParseNode("enode://de471bccee3d042261d52e9bff31458daecc406142b401d4cd848f677479f73104b9fdeb090af9583d3391b7f10cb2ba9e26865dd5fca4fcdc0fb1e3b723c786@54.94.239.50:30303"),  // BR
discover.MustParseNode("enode://1118980bf48b0a3640bdba04e0fe78b1add18e1cd99bf22d53daac1fd9972ad650df52176e7c7d89d1114cfef2bc23a2959aa54998a46afcf7d91809f0855082@52.74.57.123:30303"),  // SG

I don't know who maintains them - I'd be speculating if I made any suggestions.

If they disappeared then no new nodes would be able to bootstrap into the network.

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  • Well, you can still manually add nodes if they fail. – Waqar Lim Nov 12 '16 at 21:29
  • Yes, good point. The subtle difference is that by adding nodes using admin.addPeer() we add nodes to the list of "static" nodes rather than bootnodes. This shouldn't make any real different - it should still work :) – Richard Horrocks Nov 12 '16 at 22:16

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