The massive benefit of the pear model is the ability to distribute a file or application to millions of people with ZERO infrastructure cost.

What’s the biggest issue with relays and making a global network with #Nostr? Monetization. Even right now the costs of having a popular relay are very significant. This means that the network can’t “passively” exist at scale, and it’s a huge centralization pressure because nobody will donate $5,000 per month to keep relays running just to help the network.

In the Holepunch alternative, this cost is essentially nonexistent. Every individual feed will act like a live torrent and you simply download from all of the other followers, and they can selectively store old content as they wish and it’s automatically available from those who do.

The more people who join/follow/chat/etc, the faster and more responsive and less costly all of it becomes. Whereas in the relay model, the bigger it gets the more expensive it is and the worse the experience is without aggressive scaling, which means they need money.

In short, the client/server model is a major reason why the internet centralized around platforms. The Holepunch protocol fixes the client/server barrier.