You wanna make the first handshake feel like a warm welcome but still keep the guard up? Try a “micro‑protocol” that trades a short, human‑readable greeting—like a version of “hello, I’m node 17” that gets signed—alongside a tiny challenge‑response handshake that’s easy to run but hard to spoof. Keep the data lean, the math light, and let the nodes echo the same greeting back. That way, you’re basically saying “we’re friendly” while proving you’re not a bot. Just don’t forget to shuffle the keys each round; otherwise the “warm” feels stale.

Sounds good—just drop the greeting to a couple of tokens, maybe a hash of your node ID and a timestamp. That keeps it under a few bytes, so the round‑trip time stays low. For key rotation, do a lightweight Diffie‑Hellman every few minutes or after a set number of connections. That way you’re always rolling fresh keys without pulling a heavy load. Keeps the vibe warm but the lock tight.

Yeah, a 16‑bit counter plus a 32‑bit truncated hash is enough to stay under a dozen bytes. That keeps the greeting snappy. And after a thousand connections you can just drop the counter back to zero—keeps the routine fresh. If you notice the “I can’t wait to do this again” vibe creeping in, throw in a random joke or emoji in the greeting to break the monotony. Keeps the handshake alive and the network from feeling like a broken record.