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Comment by marknadal | Hacker News Reader

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The Internet Archive ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17685682 ) runs it, and D.Tube and notabug.io run it in production and have pushed terabyte/daily of P2P traffic.

They both use CRDTs, the CRDT that GUN uses is capable of mutable (and immutable) decentralized cryptographically secure (user accounts and all) data. This is important because indexing data can be done in realtime with P2P updates without having to rediscover the new hash of changed data (which adds extra latency/delay on immutable-only backed stores).

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I hope the text is just a little unclear and that: https://gun.eco/docs/Auth

"... Finally, you can then save data to their account that nobody else can write to:

(...)

When it is stored on disk or sent over the wire, it uses cryptographic signatures (see the video explainer), to secure the account and data without relying upon any trusted servers!

And then when you use GUN to read the data, it automatically verifies and decrypts the data for you:..."

Really means to say that data is always signed and encrypted (presumably, effectively encrypted with authenticated encryption) - and not simply signed?

It's one thing to be able to prove who wrote what, another to be able to read what everyone writes... And the latter isn't usually what you want...

SEA automatically signs/verifies.

To encrypt (cipher/decipher) data, you need to call `SEA.encrypt` ( https://gun.eco/docs/SEA#encrypt ).

There are a couple properties it automatically encrypts/decrypts (account data when you login), but beyond that you have to tell it what data is private versus public with `SEA.encrypt`.

Thank you for pointing out those docs though, certainly need to be fixed to clarify more (rather than leaving it to the video explainers) - will do that now. Thank you!

The project's choice of name deters me from even trying this unfortunately.

It would be nice if you were to expand that point. Is it for personal beliefs, or corporate policy, or something else?

Well, it's not a neutral word and this is an age where flawed filters and people might erroneously flag a search/posting history as fire arm related. It might be a low probability of causing any issue, but it's an unnecessary risk and one that would continue to niggle at me if I became dependent on the tool.

Glad you posted about this. How many peers does the largest GUN installation run, and what is the maximum? Notable difference between GUN and OrbitDB is GUN is production-ready while OrbitDB is still alpha.

D.Tube (from internal + external stats like similarweb) has had ~1M monthly uniques.

A full peer can run in every browser, but other components like DAM ( https://gun.eco/docs/DAM ) and AXE (still being developed) optimize network bandwidth, so:

Not all peers need to connect to other peers.

Some peers can be installed on laptops.

Some peers can run in the cloud.

WebRTC fails a lot because Browsers still suck, so a lot of peers still "daisy chain" through IPv6 peers (which have handled these large terabyte loads). We hope AXE will improve the WebRTC situation.

AXE will use a radix DHT to optimize peer connections, the algorithm is explained here: (copied from a chat I had explaining how it will work)

https://gun.eco/docs/DHT

So I can't give you any good answers yet, but we should get more stats coming up soon as these changes happen!

How far away is AXE from being ready for early adoption? (Btw, hi Mark! Good to see you on HN)

Hey! :D

Yeah, so @rogowski in the community has prototyped 37% of it on the AXE github branch!

I haven't had time yet myself, it would at least be several months, but the more people that team up with him (you up for joining!?) then obviously the faster it could get out.

Part of my delay is GUN works & scales well enough without needing AXE for now, so we're focusing on creating better experiences for those millions of users, to then drive more adoption to AXE when things actually start costing more.

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