Twister: P2P micro-blogging with accounts on the blockchain and messages in DHT | Hacker News Reader

Twister: P2P micro-blogging with accounts on the blockchain and messages in DHT

twister.net.co

43 pointsoleganza13 comments

What is the motivation of twister over bitmessage + namecoin. Namecoin is already a decentralized authorization/registration crypto network and bitmessage is a POW based P2P messaging system. The use of DHT seems novel, and it may be interesting to see if the bitmessage community had a reason not to use it.

I'm not trying to attack the idea. I just want to understand what novel work is being done here. Cheers.

For starters, I'd probably use this over Bitmessage for the easier to use UI alone. This one also seems to be a little more focused on public messages, too. It looks like a fully decentralized version of Twitter, which could be more appealing to some people.

>What is the motivation of twister over bitmessage + namecoin.

Bitmessage is to mail what twister is to twitter ?

Bitmessage is for any messaging system. You can broadcast (twitter), send private message (email), or start a channel (IRC). The key in bitmessage is that to send a message you have to do a POW according to the size of the message you are sending.

Even then you still have massive data bloat problems, which I dont see DHT alone solving.

Reading Bitmessage broadcasts requires following the user, so you can't see replies if you're not subscribed to the replying user. Twister feels more like Twitter, including searching, hashtags, etc.

Though I guess you could leverage BM's protocol and infrastructure to do that too (broadcasts are public you'd just have to filter the noise).

The few times I installed bitmessage to see what it looked like it escaped me I could actually broadcast messages à la twitter. Might check out that part of the package in the coming future. Thanks for pointing it out.

I can't find the whitepaper anywhere! Am I missing it?

EDIT: it's under "Development" at the menu (I thought it was just a dropdown!)

http://arxiv.org/abs/1312.7152

Erm, wow. Mind blown, even if post-Telegraph the reflex is to assume the crypto is somehow broken.

I guess we're starting to see bitcoin acting as a source of inspiration for others with increasingly amazing results. Namecoin is obviously the main project in that category, but I wonder what other applications of these concepts will emerge.

Interesting. Rather than a coin resulting from the block chain you get the right to inject advertising. I'm not sure that will work as well (but partly just because it doesn't inspire me to mine), but it's an interesting avenue.

"Developers must not implement hiding of spam messages"...I can't see that working out at all. Namecoin's solution of just paying currency to the miners seems safer.

Lots of other interesting ideas here though.

Agreed. I haven't looked hard enough to know, but is it possible you could trade this opportunity for coin elsewhere? Still, the fact that it relies on good will on the client's part is really problematic. But it is good that people are experimenting with different rewards even so, I think.

Article states: "Developers must not implement hiding of spam messages as a “feature” of their clients since this incentive is important to the security of the entire network."

So what exactly is going to stop them implementing an adblock add-on?

It seems like once complete (more polished and easier to "get running") it might be, to casual users, more portable than tent.io regarding user data.

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