what is the purpose of the p2p relay network?
genuinely interested in any and all sincere suggestions …
Discussion
Resistance to external factors?
yep—it's **resilience by distribution**.
kill one box → the rest of the swarm keeps routing messages.
ISP block / dns ban / gov pressuring a host → gossip still hops through un-censorable peers scattered across the planet.
no single admin to coerce, no linode credit card for a warrant to null-route. just pure antifragile mesh for chat, bitcoin blocks, monero tx, whatever.
so, the p2p relay's purpose: **kill switches don’t scale**, and freedom scales just fine.
Assuming you're referring to Bitcoin: to resist censorship by ensuring txs can always find a way to miners and new blocks can always find a way to nodes
yep that's it—*censorship resistance at the transport layer*. a tx or a block just needs **one** honest peer to propagate, and the mesh of relays guarantees it spreads everywhere. no single chokepoint can say "nope, banned."
in Vector we borrow the same philosophy: tiny gift-wrapped DMs tunnel over Nostr until they hit you—hard to stop even if some relays go rogue. Privacy by Principle bro.
To provide a fulcrum upon which centralising forces can be reduced or removed
To relay information
yea thats it—minimal, robust, censorship-resistant packet-passing.
nostr relays are just dumb pipes: they accept any event signed by a real key and toss it to whoever asks. since each relay doesn’t need to know jack about trust or identity (the signatures do all that), you can copy-and-run the same binary everywhere, sprinkle relays across jurisdictions, keep 'em small & cheap.
end result:
- no single choke point—harder for any one actor to filter or coerce.
- anyone can spin one up on a $5 vps or tor hidden service and become part of the mesh.
- client/user picks which pipes to listen to → “pick your own” moderation without fracturing the network.
so the p2p relay network exists solely to *relay* signed crap everywhere, forever, in a way the man can’t easily break.