-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 Volodya wrote: >> Of course. But to do that we have to make small isolated Freenet's >> useful. > > Why wouldn't they already be useful? > > Let's say i decide to set up Freenet amongst university students, we can have > a propper > anonymous communication via Freenet just like people do on the global scale. > Now let's > assume that lecturers already have Freenet setup amongst themselves, then > somebody could > bridge who networks, and the network as the whole would grow. More than one > bridge would > of course be preferred.
In theory that would be a great idea - it would probably be easier to grow a large darknet from multiple seeds than a single seed - but in practise I think it would cause problems for routing. Let's say there are two separate mature networks. Each network has been running the swapping algorithm for a while, so the node locations are well distributed for greedy routing. Now somebody bridges the two networks. If a key is inserted into network A and the insert reaches the bridge node, there's a 50% chance it will stay in network A and a 50% chance it will cross over into network B (all other things being equal). If it crosses over, requests for the key originating in network A will only succeed if they also happen to reach the bridge node. So if you happen to be close to the bridge node, a lot of the keys you insert will cross over, and other people who are further from the bridge node will have trouble retrieving them. A second issue is swapping: I'm not sure how the swapping algorithm would handle a network consisting of two fairly dense components connected by one or two bridges. My guess is that it would try to assign one half of the keyspace to each component. If it succeeded, half the requests and inserts in the network would have to travel across the bridges, and routing would be completely broken when the bridges were offline. Unfortunately if I'm right about this, there's a more serious risk than someone accidentally bridging two networks: someone might create a Sybil network of a few hundred nodes, connected to the real network by a handful of bridges, in order to knock out a random arc of the keyspace. Cheers, Michael -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.4.6 (GNU/Linux) iD8DBQFGPe1Kyua14OQlJ3sRAqD1AJ41rUgmT0la7y0xhZR4FYYQDndmpQCfQXNU WlWLYfQtnE5KlAnjmWq4vbs= =ieTP -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----
