Comment by api | Hacker News Reader

Comment by api | Hacker News Reader

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I haven't been offended by it, and I'm the founder of a company that's been around longer and is probably the closest competitor: https://www.zerotier.com/

I don't hate on people for doing similar things. If anything I am absolutely shocked it took someone this long, since to me the idea of a full mesh virtual network is how things should work, everything else is stupid and clunky, the fact that we have to bounce off servers to transfer things is dumb, and NAT is pure concentrated evil and must be destroyed.

I absolutely loved David Crawshaw's Remembering the LAN post:

https://crawshaw.io/blog/remembering-the-lan

It echoes exactly the sentiments that motivated me to start working on ZeroTier, so I wish them well.

As far as the upvotes go I just figured they have a lot of friends from their time at Google and their posts get upvoted a lot.

I notice the same thing when any company that has a lot of HN users among its employee base does anything. When AWS, Apple, and Google do a bunch of product releases the front page gets bombed for days. The site practically turns into a news feed of new AWS Elastic Beanie Cap products when the ironically titled AWS ReInvent happens. If anything the FAANG companies get more free advertising here than anyone.

> I am absolutely shocked it took someone this long

Because it's really hard to monetize it. Speaking from the experience.

Edit - This particular bicycle gets reinvented on regular basis and in a nearly identical form. While technical details are difficult, the overall idea is rather simple. Rendezvous servers to coordinate the setup and NAT traversal + relays to handle the edge cases. The tricky part is the UX... but it's still nothing compared to monetization. Very few end users will pay for this, because if it "just works", it doesn't look like something worth paying for. Smaller companies will pay, but they don't realize they need it. Larger companies realize the need, but they won't touch 3rd party managed VPNs with a long pole. It's really quite a pickle. But the tech is beautiful :)

I disagree. It is challenging to monetize, but so are many other things.

I'll give what I think are my reasons:

- It's "easy" to do a proof of concept here, but it's brutally hard to make it really work well and at scale. There are a lot of buggy NATs, highly restrictive firewalls, etc. Network virtualization, which is what you need for it to be general purpose rather than app specific, is another layer of difficulty.

- It's hard to do it securely. Anything that gets popular will get attacked a lot and has to stand up against that. It's easier to secure centralized systems against most attacks for multiple reasons.

- The dominant paradigmatic fads from 2004-2019(ish) were cloud and mobile. Cloud obviates the need for this (in exchange for all privacy and freedom), while early mobile devices and mobile data options were too wimpy to do P2P. The latter is still a problem but less so today than 5-10 years ago.

- Most P2P software has had poor usability, slowing its adoption.

- The cryptocurrency bubble sucked all the air out of the decentralization room, causing the entire notion of P2P and decentralization to get conflated with CoInZ. That seems to be ending.

I disagree that it's "brutally" hard, but to each his own.

The main issue is that the need is not well-defined and there are competing solutions that aren't as technically elegant, but as robust and as easily deployed. Competing with them on _P2P_ basis only is really hard. The only real technical benefit is lower latency... and even that may not hold true in aggressively shaped consumer networks. It used to be possible to get a bit of an edge from having near-zero hosting costs, but that's been far less relevant for a while now.

Things often seem easy to those who have done them already, but it's definitely hard for the vast majority of developers. It's also very hard when you try to do it at scale in a way that's enterprise-friendly and reliable.

(Tailscale co-founder here). I also loved Crawshaw's post. It really took me back, though I certainly wasn't doing the kind of hacking he was.

I, for one, really appreciate the nod. I agree our motivations align and I look forward to hearing more about what you and team come up with. All the best on things at ZeroTier.

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