[tahoe-dev] Resurrecting Mojo Nation

[James A. Donald]

On 2012-06-14 6:15 AM, Brian Warner wrote:
 > The "entire world as one community" case is what we call
 > the "one grid to rule them all". There are a lot of
 > engineering/scaling challenges to it (you need log(N) DHTs,
 > supernodes), in addition to features needed by a
 > mass-market product if you want that kind of scale (NAT
 > handling, bandwidth limiting, automatic update, nice UI,
 > easy installation, etc, etc).

On 2012-06-14 6:26 AM, Brian Warner wrote:
 > Oh, one other thought: another challenge of Mojo Nation was
 > that each file involved hundreds or thousands of backend
 > blocks, and the overhead of finding/tracking/downloading
 > all of them was pretty bad. If I remember right, the blocks
 > came in fixed sizes (powers of two, up to maybe 1MB), and
 > each included a little bit of data about all segments of
 > the file (to avoid the "chunking" reliability problem). The
 > result was high alacrity (you had to download the whole
 > file before any part of it became readable, so no
 > streaming) and really bad disk IO patterns on both upload
 > and download.

This challenge, and its solution, (DHT, host discovery) corresponds to a 
bittorrent magnet link, and the software that makes such links work.

This may well be the most widely used form of file sharing, so the way 
to go is likely some kind of superset of this existing solution, if we 
think of the task to solved as file sharing.