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Comment by CDSlice | Hacker News Reader

What exactly is GNUnet? It says it is supposed to replace the old internet stack, but that it also runs on top of it? It looks like it is some kind of research project, so do I just not have enough background information to understand what they are saying?

Can anyone ELI5 what GNUnet is and why I should care about it?

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Here's a few things GNUnet replaces and why it's better:

Bittorrent is replaced by GNUnet "filesharing", it's trackerless, it provides a search function, users can adjust their level of anonymity for publishing, downloading, and searching.

DNS is replaced by "GNS", it covers the "decentralized" and "secure" points in Zooko's triangle, it a pet name system.

VPN is replaced by GNUnet VPN, which is just VPN over GNUnet so it can take advantage of the p2p network.

TCP/UDP/SPDY/QUIC is replaced by "cadet", takes advantage of the p2p network.

There's also a DHT.

And there's lots of other stuff that's in-progress.

We should maybe include a "GNUnet in 5 minutes or less" on the website. The old LEGO analogy is nice, and lynX did a great comparison here: https://secushare.org/img/stack-comparison.png We don't really need the ISO OSI model here, but even this can be added, as we've already used it throughout the years to compare to the GNUnet stack.

I think somewhere we mentioned before that gnunet does not require ISPs and IXPs, but using them today is the de-facto default state.

May I draw your attention to my old comment here, as well as (more importantly), the entire thread of even older comments /it/ links to:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19959687

Which I shall also link to directly, but the above also has some relevance:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19864808

See especially here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19867532

And here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19867467

Please give me a summary of what you intend to express here. I just don't have the time to cherry-pick the information here.

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