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mhitzatoday at 12:04 PM1 replyview on HN

What are the current limitation of this system? Slow bootstrapping, high latency, large disk usage?

Is there a solution, or ideas, for DNS equivalents? I know the I2P approach (and remember that GNUNet had some unique approach as well), which can be workable in practice with "trusted registrars" as jump hosts. Name resolution feel even more important to solve in decentralized web.

How can anonymity be built on top of this system?

For ghost keys issuance, like with other privacy products, I'd really like to be able to buy redeem coupons in real life, not through stripe and all other online payment providers.


Replies

sanitytoday at 1:43 PM

> What are the current limitation of this system? Slow bootstrapping, high latency, large disk usage?

I'd say not working on mobile is probably the main one right now. Peers bootstrap into the network in seconds typically, and contract updates typically arrive at subscribed peers in under 2 seconds which was the design goal. The Freenet binary is just 10MB, and disk usage is fairly minimal as even the largest contracts are < a few MB.

> Is there a solution, or ideas, for DNS equivalents? I know the I2P approach (and remember that GNUNet had some unique approach as well), which can be workable in practice with "trusted registrars" as jump hosts. Name resolution feel even more important to solve in decentralized web.

Contracts in Freenet are identified by a hash of the contract webassembly + contract parameters - so the contract's identity is tied to its function. This is effectively a generalization of Freenet's "Signed-Subspace Keys" - which were also adopted by GNUnet.

> How can anonymity be built on top of this system?

Most likely through a mixnet or onion routing built on Freenet's contracts and delegates. If you don't mind listening to videos this was discussed in depth on a recent Freenet podcast[1].

[1] https://youtu.be/sfdsljrnJiI?si=tTs2qNglrYJOImn2