[p2p-hackers] [Cryptography] Size of the PGP userbase?

[grarpamp]

Send things to the list, not me.

On Mon, Dec 23, 2013 at 5:50 PM, Bill Broadley <bill at broadley.org> wrote:
> On 12/16/2013 12:01 AM, grarpamp wrote:
>>> You may have a look of "I2P Bote" it is severless, encrypted mail
>>> system, address is the public key, P2P based... nice tool.
>>
>> As in another post of mine, I'll be looking at that again.
>> My first take was that it stores the messages in the DHT,
>> which didn't seem scalable or reliable at all. I may be
>> wrong as I read more later.
>
> I feel like I walking in halfway into a conversation, I'm guessing this
> started on the cryptography list that I'm not on.
>
> Your DHT comment caught my attention though.  What in particular about
> DHTs don't seem scalable or reliable?
>
> Seems like DHTs are regularly in the 5-10M range and I don't see any
> reason that DHTs couldn't be 10 times that.
>
> Any reasonable churn rate and reliability could be handled with
> replication.  The bit-torrent DHT for instance claims that 45% of users
> that bootstrap from a central node are reachable 15 minutes later.  So
> typical setups involve 8 nodes per bin, and 20 bins.  So every 15
> minutes you ping 160 hosts, only reach 45%, and do some work to
> repopulate the missing slots.
>
> Given the simplicity of the bit-torrent DHT I think there's plenty of
> room for improvement.  Larger routing tables are obvious (at the cost of
> more network bandwidth to track peers).
>
> The most promising idea for DHT improvements I've seen is to divide
> peers into 3 latency groups.  High, medium, and low.   Much like L1
> cache, L2 cache, and main memory.  That way common queries are very
> fast, yet all queries still to find keys globally.