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Comment by pdxwebdev | Hacker News Reader

"1. A requirement seems to be the ability to make and receive socket connections. How would you address the typically restrictive home firewalls/NATs that most people are living with?"

IPv6 is already being deployed from top tier mobile carriers and that allows globally rout-able addresses even behind NATs.

"That doesn't inspire much confidence in the idea as a proof of concept."

This technology is a little ahead of its time, but not by much. And by the time an end-user ready core is developed, we'll we be there.

"Are you sure you're able to make that claim?"

yes, the technical hurdles are only time consuming, not insurmountable.

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> IPv6 is already being deployed from top tier mobile carriers and that allows globally rout-able addresses even behind NATs.

With all due respect, if your solution depends on the following developments in the real-world:

(1) Everyone upgrades their cheap DSL/cable home modems to something that supports IPv6 (2) Cell carriers allow incoming mobile data connections (can you say mobile DoS?) (3) People modify their firewalls (again, nothing to do with IPv4 or IPv6) to allow incoming connections (4) You devise some way of allowing static or otherwise identifiable IPv6 IPs, even when the ISP doesn't give you a static IPv6 IP

then I would say you have a number of challenges ahead of you. Assuming that device X and connect to device Y on the Internet, for consumer devices, is a very difficult proposition.

Thanks for the reply, but take Skype for example, they have gotten over these technical hurdles. I could give you a huge explanation involving relay points and NAT traversal etc. but at the end of the day, these challenges have been defeated.

Skype uses a number of super-nodes that provide some guarantees on service level and has a set of central login servers: http://www.mjalali.com/blog/?p=10

Yes, through mutual friends and indexers with persistent connections, these challenges are mitigated.

> I could give you a huge explanation involving relay points and NAT traversal etc. but at the end of the day, these challenges have been defeated.

[citation needed]

All of them (to my knowledge, and yes, I've researched this) still require some sort of central network that gets contacted first. "Trackerless" bit torrent, for example, uses a DHT that is hosted by... bittorrent.com

Indexers assist with making connections but the connections are still eventually happening directly.

If you intend to implement this, I suggest you do some serious in depth reading on peer discovery over IP based networks, including real world applications and exactly how they operate, and what their limitations are.

With all due respect, based on your posts your current understanding of how things like Skype and Bittorrent operate under the hood in a "server-less" environment has a few holes.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distributed_hash_table

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Local_Peer_Discovery

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decentralized_network_42

http://samy.pl/pwnat/

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