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Comment by nicebyte | Hacker News Reader

I am confused why this is needed.

> IP addresses can break, without warning, and it's outside of your device's control.

We have DNS?

> Keys, however, are created & controlled by you. They stay the same as your device moves, and are yours to throw away, or not.

So are domain names? This page does not do a good job of helping me find what it is that I'm missing.

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Your phone and laptop don't have stable IPs, let alone DNS entries pointing to them.

but dynamic DNS is a thing. I've had setups for it since god knows how long, though admittedly not on my phone.

Dynamic DNS takes setup for every single device, and obviously doesn't work for devices that switch networks frequently. It also doesn't help you if the IP is behind a NAT.

DynDNS does not work for devices behind a NAT unless you manually set up port forwarding.

Iroh gives you the connectivity of DynDNS without any manual configuration.

They do if you use tailscale and friends

Everyone I'd like to connect to isn't on my tailscale, nor do I want them to be.

They don't need to be https://tailscale.com/docs/features/tailscale-funnel

For this simple scenario (just exposing your laptop to a public IP) there are already a gazillion alternatives (e.g. ngrok)

Funneling means opening up the device for the entire internet to access, not just to those with my public key like in iroh. It's limited to 3 ports. It requires setup for each device. It's not peer-to-peer. It has throttled bandwidth.

No, this does not do the same thing as iroh. Not even close.

The goal posts keep moving.

First iroh was marketed as "solves communication behind NAT". Then we went to application level NAT busting vs node level NAT busting. Then we went to distributed vs client-server, then we went to stable IPs for non-server devices (your original comment). Now we moved to "true peer to peer" and "public keys".

This just tells me that the marketing site doesn't explain what Iroh actually does.

The fact that so many other people (apart from me) asked about the connection to Tailscale is also interesting.

What you're missing is that they can't charge you for IP's, and someone else already charges you for DNS/domains. They would like to replace your IP's with keys they lookup. It's a cool idea and I would expect that they'll find a market, but I'm not sure this would be a breakthrough product for me

Not affiliated, just a happy dev.

Nothing about Iroh usage as operator or end-user entails billable metering of keys, clients, QUIC endpoints, bytes transferred etc and to be honest you could deploy pretty extensive Iroh-based software without ever having a financial relationship with number0.

Correct, they do not meter keys, it's a subscription. There appears to be a free tier followed by paid tiers for increased usage (https://www.iroh.computer/pricing).

I don't use Iroh so I could be wrong, but the goal is definitely a paid service.

The paid component in question here is not necessary to use Iroh, though. You can have elaborate Iroh-based projects entirely based on the OSS components without losing features and without paying anything. There are public relays and self-hosted relays, anything else is the concern of your application(s).

As for anything being a "goal"? They do have dev salaries to pay and they offer managed control planes with SLAs or consultations with the core devs to accomplish that.

that just sounds like DNS but more centralized and not super human-friendly...

Iroh endpoint ids are just Ed25519 keypairs. We don't want you to charge per id, and even if we wanted there is no way we could.

We charge you for hosted relays and additional insights into your deployment, but the core is and will always remain free. Everything is licensed MIT and Apache2.

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