Ask HN: What to Read on Decentralised Networking? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What to Read on Decentralised Networking?

Hey guys,

So I am trying to structure my knowledge on decentralised networking. Historical development, protocols, latest trends. I am interested in more theoretical grounds behind the advances in this field. What comes to my mind are the innovations that BitTorrent, Tor, Blockchain, IPFS, and the likes brought in the last 20 years.

What are some papers that you know/read on this topic? Maybe there is a nice collection in the form of "* Papers We Love" (couldn't find one)?

Also, what books do you recommend to study?

Thank you,

and have a nice day! ^_^v!

PS: I started digging with the paper

"On Distributed Communications

I. Introduction to Distributed Communications Networks"

by Paul Baran

View on HN

By decentralized networking I’m going to assume you mean peer-to-peer networking. “Decentralized networking” would include the Internet.

All P2P networking is usually based on some form of key-based routing, kicked off by the discovery of distributed hash tables.

I’d start with the Wikipedia articles on DHT:

- https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distributed_hash_table

- https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Key-based_routing

- Liz, Crowcroft; et al. "A survey and comparison of peer-to-peer overlay network schemes" https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/teaching/2005/AdvSysTop/survey.pdf

- Guido Urdaneta, Guillaume Pierre and Maarten van Steen. A Survey of DHT Security Techniques” http://www.globule.org/publi/SDST_acmcs2009.html

- Chris Lesniewski-Laas. "A Sybil-proof one-hop DHT" https://pdos.csail.mit.edu/papers/sybil-dht-socialnets08.pdf

The unsolved problems in P2P networking are compact routing and Sybil resistance.

The cutting-edge for P2P networking projects is Yggdrasil, a fully end-to-end encrypted IPv6 mesh network that uses a spanning-tree to route packets. It’s the continuation of CJDNS. https://yggdrasil-network.github.io/about.html

OP here. Some stuff that has been suggested to me in PM (various other communication channels):

- Mastodon documentation [1]

- Nextcloud whitepapers and case studies [2]

- Book on security of distributed systems: Security Engineering: A Guide to Building Dependable Distributed Systems [3]

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[1] https://docs.joinmastodon.org

[2] https://nextcloud.com/whitepapers/

[3] https://www.amazon.com/Security-Engineering-Building-Dependa...

https://www.arweave.org/yellow-paper.pdf

If you still want to read something more practical, you can check some implementations and documentation of decentralized protocols

https://getaether.net/mim-docs/

https://docs.ipfs.io/concepts/