4 ms·

I'd be interested to hear other perspectives on this, but I think p2p computing in general got skipped over when the cloud became a thing. DHTs have had steady

by pfraze 8y ago

I'd be interested to hear other perspectives on this, but I think p2p computing in general got skipped over when the cloud became a thing. DHTs have had steady use in the p2p world though, including with BitTorrent. DHTs are not without their problems. I know some other projects in our space decided it wasn't tenable to solve the Sybil attack and so they created a peer-routing system that bootstraps off of a blockchain. As brad0 pointed out, there have also been performance issues in some deployments. We're going to iterate on the security and performance and see how it goes.

kodablah 8y ago
> I'd be interested to hear other perspectives on this, but I think p2p computing in general got skipped over when the cloud became a thing There are few commercial benefits/incentives for a DHT provider and few guarantees p2p tech can give a company requiring an always-on central presence. > I know some other projects in our space decided it wasn't tenable to solve the Sybil attack and so they created a peer-routing system that bootstraps off of a blockchain. One approach is to do the S/Kademlia thing where you require all peers to generate IDs (hash of a key) and require the it start with a certain number of 0 bits and then require another random X that, when xor'd w/ the ID, starts with a certain number of 0 bits.
- pfraze 8y ago
  > There are few commercial benefits/incentives for a DHT provider and few guarantees p2p tech can give a company requiring an always-on central presence. There are quite a few commercial benefits! It's just that nobody's properly banked on them yet. P2P distributes costs, simplifies configuration & ops, and improves data privacy. For the politically-minded, P2P also distributes power more equitably by moving business logic to user devices. P2P will not remove the need for always-on presences. You need a peer of last resort. However, running a peer will be cheaper and easier than running a server. > One approach is to do the S/Kademlia thing where you require all peers to generate IDs (hash of a key) and require the it start with a certain number of 0 bits and then require another random X that, when xor'd w/ the ID, starts with a certain number of 0 bits. We're looking at the crypto-puzzle approach, but there needs to be a work-requirement asymmetry between honest nodes and attackers, which I think is only the case with the Eclipse attacks and not the Sybil attacks. Otherwise, the puzzles only provide security if honest nodes outspend attackers, and we don't want to turn our userbase into mining farms.
  - tracker1 8y ago
    Beyond that, there's nothing stopping a commercial entity from ensuring that there are enough baseline hosts in the DHT network from always on.

by pfraze 8y ago

kodablah 8y ago

> I'd be interested to hear other perspectives on this, but I think p2p computing in general got skipped over when the cloud became a thing There are few commercial benefits/incentives for a DHT provider and few guarantees p2p tech can give a company requiring an always-on central presence. > I know some other projects in our space decided it wasn't tenable to solve the Sybil attack and so they created a peer-routing system that bootstraps off of a blockchain. One approach is to do the S/Kademlia thing where you require all peers to generate IDs (hash of a key) and require the it start with a certain number of 0 bits and then require another random X that, when xor'd w/ the ID, starts with a certain number of 0 bits.

pfraze 8y ago
> There are few commercial benefits/incentives for a DHT provider and few guarantees p2p tech can give a company requiring an always-on central presence. There are quite a few commercial benefits! It's just that nobody's properly banked on them yet. P2P distributes costs, simplifies configuration & ops, and improves data privacy. For the politically-minded, P2P also distributes power more equitably by moving business logic to user devices. P2P will not remove the need for always-on presences. You need a peer of last resort. However, running a peer will be cheaper and easier than running a server. > One approach is to do the S/Kademlia thing where you require all peers to generate IDs (hash of a key) and require the it start with a certain number of 0 bits and then require another random X that, when xor'd w/ the ID, starts with a certain number of 0 bits. We're looking at the crypto-puzzle approach, but there needs to be a work-requirement asymmetry between honest nodes and attackers, which I think is only the case with the Eclipse attacks and not the Sybil attacks. Otherwise, the puzzles only provide security if honest nodes outspend attackers, and we don't want to turn our userbase into mining farms.
- tracker1 8y ago
  Beyond that, there's nothing stopping a commercial entity from ensuring that there are enough baseline hosts in the DHT network from always on.