practical gains? None.

theroetical gains?

* They can try to pick a server near them (I don't think the servers are geo-dist)

* No external DNS lookup (silly, whats a one-time cached 150 ms between friends)

* Immune to DNS outage (lol, if your DNS is working other stuff is prob broke..)

* More resistant to someone pretending to be github (expect that github uses HTTPS..)

So really no point I can think of... but is sure makes you computer brittle to github changing anything!