On Mon, 6 Feb 1995, Wei Dai wrote:
I think over the long run the last factor will be most important. In a DC-Net, for each bit one participant wants to send to another, EVERY OTHER participant must broadcast a bit to ALL participants. I can imagine a remailer-net with one million users, but I don't see any possibility that a DC-Net can be scaled to that size.
Not so -- you merely have to broadcast to enough people. But then the topology, and hence the complexity, gets worse. This however merely reduces the bandwidth waste from n^2 to n*lg(n) A further wrinkle -- forming DC nets of DC nets, can reduce the bandwidth waste to lg(n)^2, which should scale adequately to cover the cosmos, but then the complexity gets really scary. And when you try to figure how to deal with denial of service attacks in a big DC net that tries to use bandwidth with tolerable efficiency -- I don't know if anyone has figured out what would be involved -- I certainly have not. --------------------------------------------------------------------- | We have the right to defend ourselves | http://www.catalog.com/jamesd/ and our property, because of the kind | of animals that we are. True law | James A. Donald derives from this right, not from the | arbitrary power of the omnipotent state. | jamesd@netcom.com