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Comment by tornadofart | Hacker News Reader

Great technical achievement. What is, for you, the sweet spot between VPN and TOR? What's the tradeoff there?

If you want Tor for your _whole_ existing system, not just the browser, good luck.

If you want actually good privacy with a VPN, also good luck with that. (There are very few good companies doing the best they can here, but they are still limited technologically.)

SPN can be seen as my attempt to solve both of these issues.

So, what are the tradeoffs? In some ways it’s better than both VPNs and Tor — but in what ways it’s worse?

Well, it is in the middle: Not as fast as a VPN, not as private as Tor.

Impressive design! Are you assuming bandwidth is free and abundant?

Mycoria routers, proxies, Tor exit nodes, and VPNs are difficult to run. There needs to be an global incentive, economy, or private community usually. Our Delft University students wrote "The fifteen year struggle of decentralizing privacy-enhancing technology" a decade ago. Scaling to many millions or billions is unsolved.

Have you talked to any lawyer or law professor about your MVP? "Being welcome" has known drawbacks when you operate a central DNS service.

Thanks! Well, every participant has to cover their own server/bandwidth cost. So, from my perspective, yes, bandwidth is free and abundant. Although I hope that Mycoria can/will perform well in lower bandwidth areas.

Interesting. Can you link that paper/article?

The DNS is not central. Everyone maintains their own local mapping. When accessing a website on mycoria, you open a URL like this that first creates the mapping and then forwards you to it: http://router.myco/open/speedtest.de.myco/fd13:6239:a07a:eb4...

> Can you link that paper/article?

I'm not who you asked, but this appears to be the article:

https://arxiv.org/abs/1404.4818

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