First I would like to thank you for actually replying, I see you were the one who initially answered the OP and its been more than 2 years since this was first opened.
Yes if the irc channel went down, it would take peer discovery down as well.
So this question isn't just a question for the sake of general knowledge but for utilization. A little background. There is a Geospatial related coin that is set to implement GEO related features. One of the features that would be nice to impliment would be the mapping of all users by city, state, country and what not. I am not the dev but an in the GEO field and would like to help as much as possible, even if the coin becomes a flop, the idea can still be dedicated elsewhere.
Can the operation of peer discover be split between the 2 operations? If one went down there would always be current discovery.
Yes you could, but even with the current peer discovery you can map most of the nodes on the network.
Current Peer discovery seems to only map out nodes but not individual ips interacting. If there is another way to pull the information that is much more than nodes, do you know a way?