Optimizations for IRC Protocol?

epiphani asks: "Over the past few years IRC has grown substantially. With this growth, many issues are arising with bandwidth usage. I've started rewriting the client-side protocol that has remained completely unchanged since the publication of RFC1459. During my conversations with various client authors and coders from the major networks, the suggestion has been made to remove the nickname as the unique namespace, replacing it with an ICQ-like UIN. This would mean the same nickname could appear more than once on a network. This would also apply to channel names, just as EFnet is planning to do in hybrid7, with Vchans. Does anyone have any suggestions to optimization of the current client-side protocol?"