> It seems like we have a quite different understanding how DHTs are used, probably shaped by different use-cases. Let me see if I can summarize yours correctly

> It seems like we have a quite different understanding how DHTs are used, probably shaped by different use-cases. Let me see if I can summarize yours correctly: a) over time nodes will be interested or have visited in a large proportion of the keyspace b) it makes sense to eventually replicate the whole dataset c) the data mutation rate is relatively low d) access to the keyspace is extremely biased, there is some subset of keys that almost all nodes will access. Is that about right? Agreed on (a), (b), and (c). In (a), the entire keyspace will be visited by each node, since they have to index the underlying blockchain in order to reach consensus on the state of the system (i.e. each Blockstack node is a replicated state machine, and the blockchain encodes the sequence of state-transitions each node must make). (d) is probably correct, but I don't have data to back it up (e.g. because of (b), a locally-running application node accesses its locally-hosted Blockstack data, so we don't ever see read accesses). > In my case this is very different. Node turnover is high (mean life time <24h), data is volatile (mean lifetime <2 hours), nodes are only ever interested in a tiny fraction of the keyspace (<0.1%), nodes access random subsets of the keyspace, so there's little overlap in their behavior. The data would become largely obsolete before you even replicated half the DHT unless you spent a lot of overhead on keeping up with hundreds of megabytes of churn per hour and you would never use most of it. Thank you for clarifying. Can you further characterize the distribution of reads writes over the keyspace in your use-case? (Not sure if you're referring to the Bittorrent DHT behavior in your description, so apologies if these questions are redundant). For example: * Are there a few keys that are really popular, or are keys equally likely to be read? * Do nodes usually read their own keys, or do they usually read other nodes' keys? * Is your DHT content-addressable (e.g. a key is the hash of its value)? If so, how do other nodes discover the keys they want to read? * If your DHT is not content-addressable, how do you deal with inconsistent writes during a partition? More importantly, how do you know the value given back by a remote node is the "right" value for the key?