Cjdns v20 Release
cryptpad.fr
cryptpad.fr
It's basically a network of VPN tunnels. They call the network "hyperboria" and, as an overlay network, it runs on top of the internet. It doesn't provide anything that https doesn't already provide, but the community insists that it is a "mesh network" that will replace the internet. The basis for this claim is the fact that one could conceivably run one of the tunnels over an ethernet link. But today, as far as I can tell, it's a bunch of dudes with regular ISP connections looking at websites over a VPN. A very different thing than the community mesh networks actually providing internet access in places like Athens, Catalonia, and Berlin.
The one interesting thing about CJDNS was the DHT routing technique that they just got rid of. It could drastically cut down on the amount of memory used for routing information by each node. In theory, you could route to any destination in the world on a completely flat network. This is in contrast to the system today, where routers know about every IP reachable on their subnet and rely on other routers to deal with traffic bound for other subnets. Some previous work[1][2] (unfortunately not cited by CJDNS in their paper), can give you a much clearer and theoretically solid idea of how this works.
I believe that if somebody is ever able to make DHT routing performant, it will be a huge breakthrough. I guess CJDNS will not be that project. AFAIK the DHT routing protocol that CJDNS just replaced was not able to find optimal routes. Your packets would get to their destination somehow, but it's very unlikely that they would get there on the shortest path. Sounds like CJDNS has given up on trying to improve it, and is now purely a hobbyist VPN network with centralized control.
I highly recommend you read the papers below, DHT routing is actually very interesting. Hopefully a newer, more theoretically rigorous project to achieve this will emerge now that CJDNS has dropped the concept.
[1] http://os.itec.kit.edu/downloads/publ_2006_fuhrmann-ua_pushi... [2] https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/wp-content/uploads/...
It's not really just about optimal routes. A pretty major problem with the DHT is that it is very chatty, and even edge nodes that might like to be "left alone" are often included in the conversation. This isn't ideal for any kind of low-power or mobile device. Plus DHT convergence is incredibly slow - not great for mobile devices or jumping between networks either. It actually turns out that sometimes a bit of centralisation drastically improves efficiency.
Has the cryptography been audited yet? I seem to remember that that was something big coming up Real Soon Now.
And BGP is far from ideal too.
People probably laughed at the efforts of those trying to overthrow monarchs and dictators, and instate democracy. And that was hard too, but it doesn't mean it wasn't worthwhile.
* Except in all the places where it's succeeded and vastly improved the world.
The web, git, bitcoin, email. They are all incremental improvements on more-centralised predecessors.
The web is very decentralized when it started, but it was impossible to find anything, so you would pass along lists of interesting URLs via email lists, usenet postings, etc. Eventually we get catalogues like Yahoo and later search engines like Altavista and Google. The later were a huge step towards centralization of the web and we have not really gotten around this problem.
Email was initially very decentralized (I am talking things like UUCP, Bitnet mail, Fido, etc.) but message routing was a major pain as anyone who remembers UUCP bangpaths can tell you. SMTP is a bit of a sidestep on this path, making addressing easier by moving somewhat in a decentralized direction with direct TCP delivery (and then a half-step back with MX records and centralization of campus-wide email systems.) While email was decentralized it was also open to parasites and we fought the good fight for a while but are now at a point where more than half of all email in the US runs through three organizations because they have the resources and expertise to deliver a good product and control spam -- not exactly decentralized anymore is it?
Git? Yeah, for your small repo. Now try to make that repo open to the rest of the internet and participate in the global source web. Oh yeah, up to github or bitbucket you go. Once again we centralize to scale up and to solve the discoverability problem. Outside of a local context git is almost completely centralized.
Bitcoin? I would point out how only a few mining consortiums control the bulk of the hashing output, but we are now reaching fish in a barrel stage.
If you examine all of these 'improvements' I think you will see that they became more centralized as they scaled up to solve problems with efficiency, discoverability, complexity, and controlling parasites and increasing the cost for attackers. As I stated initially, decentralization for its own sake is almost always a sure sign of an amateur who does not understand the math of network relationships or who has no experience in the field and is just itching to make a dash through the minefield without noticing all of the dead bodies ahead of them or bothering to learn from these lessons.
However, I see no evidence of that with CJDNS. What makes you think it is anything but an honest stab at a hard problem?