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Comment by pdxwebdev | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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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