Ask HN: Has anyone solved P2P routing at 100B+ nodes without DHT degradation?
6
iikhrabry about 4 hours ago 11 comments
ZH version is available. Content is displayed in original English for accuracy.
The two of us (PhD in Physics and Mathematics and Philosophical Anthropology) have spent many years working on a mathematically protected secret voting system suitable for making socially significant decisions. During the design process, we realized that such a system must be a peer-to-peer network satisfying six absolute requirements.
We have not been able to find a single existing protocol or academic paper that simultaneously satisfies more than two of them:
First: anonymous user authentication that guarantees the uniqueness of the user's representation in the network (preventing one person from creating multiple accounts) without storing their personal data and without using any external resources, such as certificate authorities or a trusted third party.
Second: a network providing such anonymous authentication must be capable of covering all inhabitants of the Earth. Currently that is just over 8 billion people, but this number grows by more than 100 million every year. Moreover, the deceased must not be excluded from the system, which means monotonic growth is endless.
Third: a network that guarantees anonymity must not have any distinguished nodes—that is, it must be strictly peer-to-peer, consisting of nodes formed by users' devices. However, each user may have not one but several devices, and devices can fail, get lost, become obsolete, or even simply go out of fashion. This immediately changes the scale of the network—it must handle hundreds of billions of nodes.
Fourth: it is necessary to provide each user with access to their account from any device without using passwords, tokens, seed phrases, or anything similar.
Fifth: the key requirement becomes performing a search that enables user recognition in less than 1 second (so that it is imperceptible to the user). That is, any device must locate any other device or data in less than 1 second, while the amount of routing information stored by a single device must be negligibly small, preferably under 100 KB.
Sixth: to guarantee data preservation on unreliable user devices, first, the replication factor must be ~100 or even ~1000x, and second, there must be verification and recovery of routing and data based on consensus without a central arbiter or trusted nodes. At the same time, background synchronization traffic must remain below a few hundred bytes/sec per device to avoid overwhelming mobile data plans.
Our question to HN:
Is the community aware of any existing P2P protocol, DHT, or academic proposal that even attempts to simultaneously satisfy these constraints? We have studied Kademlia, Chord, BATMAN, GNUnet, I2P, etc., and all of them seem to fail at scalability or traffic efficiency. Are we missing something fundamental, or is this truly a blind spot?
(This question is motivated by the fact that we have developed a candidate architecture that, in our opinion, solves all six problems. A brief description can be found on our GitHub [https://github.com/ikhrabry-spec/A-P2P-Network-Architecture-for-100B-Nodes]. Patent applications have been filed, and one patent has been granted. However, we doubt the novelty of our solutions and the absence of analogues—please point us to anything we may have missed.)
Discussion (11 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews
The post/project itself is an obvious scam. The first point is already impossible to do. The rest don't make much sense for the use case. And nobody would solve those issues without a serious lit review that doesn't require further asking HN such questions... after you have a solution... after years spent. Or hide their identity if they're doing PhD.
So is this just a funnel to get some people to check their domain? (For some voting system nowhere close to the description) Or is this some more interesting campaign?
Edit: And the repo is gone now. I hope whatever was the goal didn't work.
Work in tech long enough and you'll encounter the idea of purity.
It is a highly useful concept in technology. It usually means that you've entered the domain of math -- that things have become elegant in their simplicity. Functions without side effects are commonly called "pure functions" for example becuase of the mathematically beautiful ways you can reason about them. A greeat deal of Computer Science in practice depends on the composability that comes from working with pure functions.
But there's a catch!! It's no mistake that "purity", the word used for the math-i-ness of a thing, is the same word used to describe religious extremism. Functionally pure systems only work if every function inside them is pure. One side-effect-having stinker deep, deep down there in the call tree ruins the whole illusion. Purity is necessarily all-encompassing and must seek to eradicate that which is impure so that only that reasoning can be restricted to that which is pure, and clean mathematical axioms can then be developed on which to base the elevated reasoning.
What I'm telling you in no uncertain terms is that Naziism was just such an exercise in the idea of purity as applied to human beings. All of the most horrific crimes against humanity: genocides, mass murders and the like, have been executed by people pursuing purity.
To hate people is, in a way, much kinder than to simply consider them to be completely outside the domain you care about. And because your goal is to reduce all of society and humanity to fit inside a domain with clean, machine-executable roles, you will only be able to fully satisfy your itch for purity once you have destroyed or fully excluded and marginalized all that does not conform.
I'm thankful then that I agree with others that your technical premise is a literal impossibility, a child's fantasy dispelled by first contact with the school of hard knocks.
If larger or more powerful groups want to impose their will on smaller ones, they can go ahead and unilaterally do that, and own their behavior. Doing it "democratically" is just victim blaming.
What would even be the point of democracy once privacy is gone and with it free speech?
I think the closest real world model would be China, where the government gives you a "happy shiny society member" score for how little you ever dissent and how well you can recite propaganda. ...and of course if you ask the CCP they will tell you that the will of the people is absolutely being done, and the ID-powered surveillance is just helping ; )
What's your ID by the way? Will you tell me? Would you?
A global political voting system can only be used for evil, so why would you want it?
I fear you might have a fundamental misunderstanding of what the world is really like, and what people are really like.
After all, the system you describe would not be used for democratic voting, it would be the ultimate playing field in which to weaponize surveillance capitalism and fascist control over societies. If you can't see how that could be true, then you cannot have given much if any serious philosophical thought to technology, because all attempts to fit the messiness of the world into an abstraction and "throw away the trimmings" is a violence you do to the real lives of real people