4 ms·

What protocols/networks do you consider P2P? Every P2P technology I have used requires some bootstrapping. I have done WebRTC with zero signaling, but browser

• Uptrenda 3y ago
  Bootstrapping is an interesting problem. If there's a large P2P network (think like Gnutella) there's papers that have proposed using port scanning of residential IP ranges to find peers that belong to the network. It's an interesting approach because there's no centralized bootstrapping servers. But, port scanning is inefficient and such an approach may only be viable if a network is large (I may be wrong here.) Still, I think it's cool how little work has been done on these problems. I am still really into p2p networks. For my own project I observed that all of the main networks in some way still depend on trusted introduction points. Just many of them and combined. So I think using infrastructure that's federated and open is a good design (in my case: public MQTT servers is what my own software is based on.)
• convolvatron 3y ago
  I think it's worth remembering that the original intent of the internet was entirely p2p and this bootstrapping issue wasn't a problem. In fact, there was a whole set of protocols developed around global multicast that allowed for discovery to build exactly these structures. So you can't blame the ietf for not thinking of this problem - you can blame them for not being able to respond well when the market went and mucked up their architecture by putting nat everywhere.