Hacker News Reader

Comment by jesprenj | Hacker News Reader

> To eliminate the reliance on a central server, ZeroNet provides an internal plugin called BootStrapper, which allows peers to function as trackers.

Why use this concept of trackers when we have better (more distributed) alternatives in the form of distributed hash tables (DHTs), such as Kademlia, the one BitTorrent itself uses for trackerless torrents?

View on HN

DHT still needs to be bootstrapped: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1181301/how-does-a-dht-i...

One question on this topic interests me: In BitTorrent, do nodes that bootstrap using different bootstrap servers, ever see themselves in one single connected graph?

Since there are many different bootstrap servers for mainline DHT in BT, how is it ensured that nodes from two or more different bootstrap servers know about each other?

Is it possible (and how often does it happen) that a node that boostraps using server A will never find nodes that bootstrap using server B?

Yes, they should always see themselves in the same graph. Generally, bootstrap nodes will offer up addresses of further nodes that all belong to the same global network. This doesn't have to be the case, but it is the intention.

The nodes they know belong to the same network. Bootstrap nodes don't have to know about each other.

Yes. A network can split, all it takes is a node that knows nodes in both networks to join them.

But do such nodes exist in practice (in the current network). It would be interesting to research what clients connect to multiple bootstrap servers.

All implementations that I'm aware of use at least 4 bootstrap nodes. And you always bootstrap from all of them, there's no point just picking one. Here's my implementation, for example: https://github.com/anacrolix/dht/blob/master/dht.go#L106-L11....

Nice, thank you.

ZeroNet is now not in development but using DHT was on the list of things that were wanted to be implemented. It had many other problems like the .bit domains were kindof centralised by Tamas not using the namecoin blockchain.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com