Listened to your latest episode today, the one particularly about it. That explained some things, although I'm missing a lot since I'm not a programmer.
Have I understood it correctly that it is some kind of "base-tool" for programmers to include in their programs, a kind of basis for establishing p2p connections that different programs then can use for different purposes?
It’s both a base engine for your app to automatically be able to use P2P connections for its own networking, without needing to deal with any of the P2P complexity. But then also it’s a way to distribute the actual app P2P as well.
So if I build a little app, and run “pear stage [app key]” on my MacBook, then you run “pear run [app key]” on your computer, you can literally live run the app directly off of my machine with no added confusion or GitHub accounts or any crap like that.
Makes me wonder what centralized nodes are required and running to make any initial dht connectivity operational. IPFS was thought to be a system like this but the team maintains server seed nodes needed for any kind of “p2p” operations between arbitrary peers. A real letdown.
There are only DHT peers that get the initial index of the network, but there’s tons of them. It’s literally the exact same as BitTorrent. After you have any touch point to the network you don’t need or connect to anyone by default. You just need initial connections to “open” the network in a sense. Not totally unlike how bitcoin core has a list of beginning nodes to start connecting.m, but they don’t matter in any meaningful sense and you could always change them arbitrarily without losing any functionality or reliability if you wanted.
BitTorrent is indeed the model to follow
#coolness
Seems interesting. Does it automatically download the app in question, and seed (to use torrent terminology, I don't know what it's called here) it to others? In that case, can it be used as a distribution channel also for stand-alone non-internet apps (e.g. single player games), and could such apps then be taken out of it to be distributed by other means, such as a USB memory, if needed?
Basically yes. you can essentially think of it as a live, streaming torrent system. Best way to picture it, imo. In fact Mathias apparently built the streaming functionality into torrents that another team forked and used to make Popcorn Time, which i just learned watching an 8 year old video of his the other day. So that's essentially where this all originated from.
In that case, it seems like it could replace many centralized services, while giving us something technically better, if I understand it correctly. If the people developing such a service keep their hands out of the DRM, user-hostile, side of things, perhaps we could have something similar to a Youtube with automatic youtube-downloader, not as a workaround but as a part of how the system functions. A video "site" without the copyright strikes that has killed a lot of good content on YT. That would be awesome if it catches on.
