Keet – P2P Video and Text
keet.io
keet.io
1. Looks like you're not using libp2p, why? (Not accusing, just wondering)
2. What is your fallback mechanism when hole punching isn't possible? Relay nodes?
3. Follow-up: how do you ensure an acceptable QoS (latency, bandwidth, time to peer-discovery etc) for that fallback mechanism?
4. How do you handle many participants? Amount of chatter scales n^2 by default in p2p.
5. What application bundler are you using (eg electron)?
6. Bonus: what technical challenges were hardest? Any big unsolved problems?
Thank you.
It's also a better and more correct way to use bitcoin just as money, and not as some kind of ownership token, which plagues the web3 scene. The core purpose of money is to be interoperable, to allow all kinds of goods and services to be traded in a common unit and payment network.
Perhaps this app is just for blockchain people? If it's another Internet of Coins app then that explains the vague website and the lack of things like privacy policies.
I do find it funny that they've added rules about linking to their website to their terms and conditions. As if they have any right to control the way people link to them.
Congratulations on your family being financially stable!
I use dedicated banking apps to "transfer value" because they're easy to use, secure, developed by a party I trust, and have legal protection from by law.
I get it, shittier countries don't have easy (or any) access to good banks. I still maintain that these value transfers should be done through their separate, secured and verified apps, no matter the transaction mechanism. Send money in the form of NFTs if that's what you want, but do so through an app that's built to do so securely, not some random NodeJS chat app.
Hell, because of the peer to peer nature of this thing, people's contacts can easily be tracked by the government. Good luck convincing the tax auditor that you didn't in fact send your parents a bunch of money when they have the connection logs to show it, enjoy paying unscrupulous taxes to your oppressive government. I'll take my alternative payment system offline or through a trusted third party server, thank you very much.
And I don't think I was wrong, because found out only later that this is funded by Tether and Bitfinex. The actual purpose of this project seems to be to pump the value of the owner's cryptocurrencies. So a hard pass from me.
Don't get me wrong. I am nutural towards bitfinex. Haven't had to deal with them until now. I would wait how the project develops and then maybe give it a chance.
I absolutely agree: hypercore, their DHT and holepunching work is excellent.
My frustration stems from the fact that nothing in the innovative part of Keet needs cryptocurrencies. Now "pump" was the wrong term there. I meant cryptocurrency businesses are trying desperately to find any semi legitimate use cases for their tech becauae if they do, that'll cause the value of the coins they own to go up, and thus making them richer. Without that awkwardly bolted on Bitcoin nonsense in Keet neither of the funding companies would have given them a dime.
The red flag is because the good of keet does not negate the bad of promoting cryptocurrencies. Cryptocurrencies are a technological dead end, politically totally against everything I stand for, and morally bankrupt wrt the ecological disaster that is PoW and the pyramid scheme with the already powerful and or wealthy reaping even more for themselves.
I'm also not alone here, see e.g. https://concerned.tech
Furthermore Keet developers' decision to accept that money makes me doubt their judgement, and question where their startup will end up.
For those reasons, I won't use nor recommend keet to anyone.
I think the use of P2P like DHT is very smart, but like others I am wary due to the source.
As best I can tell:
Hypercore = company without a website? I can't find one. Holepunch = platform made by Hypercore - again no website? Funded by Tether and Bitfinex Keet = First app that uses Holepunch
Based on the amount of funding that Tether and Bitfinex are putting into this, this does not appear to be a neutral technology.
They do have a "killer app" though.
The other stuff: wary.
(e.g. https://en.cryptonomist.ch/2022/07/25/tether-bitfinex-hyperc... seems to me to be wrong about Hypercore being a "company")
> Payments Built In
> As your app grows beyond the hobby phase, Holepunch lets you evolve into a business without compromises.
> With Bitcoin Lightning and USDt micropayments built-in, it's easy to implement and use powerful paid features in apps.
When asked about this, the founder seems supportive of cryptocurrency: https://twitter.com/ttiurani/status/1551524775402635265
Supporting Bitcoin in any way is a sign that they are incapable of detecting scams that will destroy life on earth, which is a bad sign for them dealing with other scams or ethical dilemmas.
> Supporting Bitcoin in any way is a sign that they are incapable of detecting scams that will destroy life on earth
Well, we couldn't disagree more there. A focus on bitcoin while ignoring other crypto scams shows a great deal of sophistication, understanding of the space, and moral fortitude.
Do you understand that heat waves, flooding, forest fires, and other extreme weather events will interfere with the delivery of energy? Do you understand that water shortages will interfere with the delivery of energy (e.g. nuclear power plants need water for cooling)? Do you understand that resource wars will interfere with the delivery of energy? Do you understand that climate change preventing food from growing will interfere with the survival of the people who deliver the energy?
Of course energy is vital to human existence, I recommend e.g. Energy and Civilization by Vaclav Smil to anyone who wants to understand this in great detail: https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/energy-and-civilization But the climate crisis will interfere with energy production and delivery, just as it interferes with everything else that humans want or need to do. Refusing to reduce energy usage voluntarily will result in involuntary reduction in energy usage as systems fail.
This is what I have issue with. Energy use benefits humanity. Full stop.
If you said civilization needs bananas to survive and flourish, then some good samaritan came along and said "I will always buy any leftover bananas you can't sell no matter where or when you grow them", you would get many more banana farms, people experimenting with new banana growing/harvesting technology, etc. It's an undeniable benefit if your goal is to produce more bananas.
If energy efficiency and green energy sources will not suffice to reduce our burning of fossil fuels, due in part to Bitcoin and its ilk, then the only way to avoid climate catastrophe would be simply doing less, a.k.a. degrowth. I leave it as an exercise for the reader to imagine what the typical cryptocurrency advocate thinks of degrowth. (But that would interfere with the numbers going up!)
In short, Bitcoin is a major roadblock to any response to the climate crisis, using any strategy.
This is 100% a fake problem that clearly does not exist if you understood anything about the energy market. Civilization is at an increasing rate consuming more electricity. Surely, someone who believes carbon emissions are destroying the planet would agree we need to electrify everything. Bitcoin consuming and therefore monetizing stranded and/or temporary excess amounts of energy make accelerated electrification of our society a much more realistic endeavor. Having an electricity dung-beetle, a buyer of last resort, is a revelation.
BINGO!
If you have something that will buy any left over or unusable stock of product X, the production of X becomes less risky and easier to invest in. This isn't hard. Bitcoin incentivizes energy production and innovation. If you want that energy to be green, bitcoin is still more than willing to buy it from you. Lowering the risk of innovation in the space is obviously good for green energy.
Your arguments work just as well for reducing risk for investing in "marginal" fossil fuel sources.
Bitcoin does nothing to alter or effect other incentives or disincentives on energy production.
Assuming prices are equivalent, it's net neutral on production mix. However, we've been told renewable energy is cheaper! Therefore it accelerates its adoption.
Please stop saying this. Aluminum refining or hydrogen electrolysis fits so much better and actually benefits society.
Oil and Gas companies are reducing CO2-equivalent emissions by about 63% by mining with flared natural gas: https://www.cnbc.com/2022/02/12/23-year-old-texans-made-4-mi...
Large solar farms are being built that otherwise would not have: https://www.reuters.com/technology/tesla-block-blockstream-m...
You've made your arguement for "planet destroying", now why is it a "scam"?
Of course, the climate crisis is caused in large part by capitalism failing to deal with negative externalities, so one could argue that Bitcoin is just another facet of our corrupt system privatizing benefits and making the public bear the costs. But nevertheless this is a fundamental flaw in arguments that Bitcoin miners only farm where energy is "cheapest".
As for why it's a scam, it's hard to summarize, but I'll try: cryptocurrency is not currency, not decentralized, and not private. https://jacobin.com/2022/01/cryptocurrency-scam-blockchain-b...
Why? Because you said so?
> not decentralized
Bitcoin is quite possibly the most decentralized computer technology ever created. Name something more decentralized.
> not private
I processed around $15k in instant bitcoin transactions this month and have zero insight into who the sender or receiver are
The block reward gets cut in half every couple years. Right now it’s $18M/day, and at its peak it was $60 million per day. Assuming the price of btc doesn’t shoot back up, that puts an upper limit on the amount of money spent by miners on electricity at $60M/day. To put that number in perspective, the US alone spends $3B/day on energy.
And as a typical cryptocurrency advocate, I always find it amusing when HN programmers, probably in the richest 1% of the world globally, talk about how the line going up even more just isn’t really that important. It already went up for you, maybe we should ask people in brazil or in the philippines or in subsaharan africa if they want their line to go up.
On the business side: Why did they try to trademark a common networking term ("holepunch")? Why did they add a whole section labeled "Rules about linking to our Site" to the terms of service, are they in the business of shutting down customers who leave bad reviews or write bad negative posts?
As for competition, how is this better than slapping a blockchain onto any other messenger?
its not really a solvable problem with just clever networking but something that AI needs to take over in terms of upping and filling in the gaps from the network limitations (resolution upping, deepfake like techniques)
i'm still under the impression that SFU And centralized servers is the only way to deliver massive scaling and consistent performance and even this is not perfect.
Ew; punny and/or topical names are fine, but just grabbing a term of art and using it for your product is 1. anti-social behaviour, and 2. not even a good idea selfishly, since you'll have an awful time trademarking it.
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hole_punching_%28networking%29)
As long as they don't try to enforce any stupid trademarks over a common term like that I don't see the problem.