Live data from Hacker News

Holepunch Unveils P2P Platform "Pear Runtime"

pears.com

51–56 of 56 posts

Re: Holepunch Unveils P2P Platform "Pear Runtime"

#51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But exchange like: - A is better than B! - B has bailouts fearure! Clearly implies that you either really mentioned bailouts as a positive feature, or that commentary of yours makes no sense. Why do you call your opponent dishonest? If you mean something else it's probably better to explain than to immediately enter holywar mode.

My point is that you can not compare Tether with a bank and say "Tether has more reserves than banks" and ignore why it is so. It's pure gaslighting and I'm honestly surprised that so many people are buying this bullshit.

and my point is that their overlapping features of custody and their overlapping vulnerability to bank runs (or lack thereof) is more important

if banks operate at 3-10% reserves or immediate liquidity, all the time, then tether is just as or more resilient.

if you need to move the goal post to insurance, simply to look at differences, its apt to remember that banks are private corporations that thought it would be funny to codify state sponsored insurance to bolster their own business of deposits. putting the con in congress. similarly uninsured products have been covered in bailouts for the exact same reason. And can happen again. There is zero history that suggests crypto products would be excluded simply for being crypto. Its far more likely that crypto industry grows big enough, and crypto friendly personnel run regulatory agencies and congress to be ready to act and advocate for it.

But even that isnt important to me, only an observation. I dont need that confidence game just to move the goalpost even further on tether, you might.

My only point is that we’re clear on what the controversies are and why. Its withstood extremely trying macroeconomic environments because it is designed better, and that was the only thing people were worried about.

That being said, I would like an even better designed product. Overcollateralized stablecoin with completely onchain collateral. We’ve been close but not quite.

Re: Holepunch Unveils P2P Platform "Pear Runtime"

#52
post #41
post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This seems like it should be solvable by having the stateful firewall support e.g. Port Control Protocol (RFC6887). Obviously that has to be done by the network rather than the client, but what's stopping them? It can't be resource consumption, it's an efficiency measure for the network too and "we don't kill your battery life" is an advertisable feature.

Mobile carriers have less than zero incentive to do this, so it’s dead. Middle boxes in general have to be treated like natural laws or acts of god by developers. There’s like zero chance of affecting them outside the very narrow homelab segment. Even enterprise vendors generally can’t persuade companies to alter policies there.

Expecting all networks to do this is a pipe dream because there are too many of them and a large proportion are administered by people you might not have anything charitable to say about. And then you're stuck falling back to something ugly, like tunneling over HTTPS to a device that can map that port and using it as a relay.

But you could still use it wherever it's available. Mobile devices spend a significant proportion of the time on home WiFi networks.

And there are only three major US wireless carriers. That isn't a matter of convincing a million absentee corporate firewall administrators, it's a matter of convincing three specific entities, any one of which would be a major win.

I'm half tempted to start making "enterprise firewalls" (i.e. a thin wrapper around Linux netfilter running on commodity hardware) and then enable RFC6887 by default and put a warning in the documentation not to turn it off because forcing applications to tunnel traffic over outgoing HTTPS can impair the functionality of intrusion detection systems and remove valuable information from audit logs.

Re: Holepunch Unveils P2P Platform "Pear Runtime"

#53
post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's really cool—big props to you! Really dig being able to effortlessly create and share graphical P2P apps with others. I'm keen to test this with others and dive deeper. The docs were a bit vague on what 'identity' means—is it just a username, or more like a public key? The idea of connecting or 'joining' others in P2P apps seems complex for many. Sharing keys or long strings might be intimidating for widespread…

Thanks for the positive feedback! Identity is a public key. You have a contact list that you add keys too. When two people exchange keys and add them to their lists, they automatically connect and can have conversations. Exchanging keys you needed another channel (email, sms, etc) or use the introduction system inside the app where you can introduce one person to another. In regards to total users? I have no idea. By…

Thank you for your reply and for breaking down how identity worked. It makes perfect sense now.

The idea of having no user tracking also aligns brilliantly with the ethos of a truly P2P application.

I'm right there with you, hoping to see more decentralised models of communication in the future!

Re: Holepunch Unveils P2P Platform "Pear Runtime"

#54
post #14
post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm guessing its due to the NATs they use. Carrier-grade NATs with made-up IPs and symmetric NATs. You can have some kind of options for symmetric NATs. But I'm not too sure about carrier-grade NATs yet as I've never even written code for this yet.

No it's mostly the battery limitations. Keeping links open P2P requires keepalive because NATs will time out. Even with IPv6 there are usually stateful firewalls in the way that will time out. This means you're constantly sending little packets, and if you have a lot of links there's a lot of keep alive cycles that have to be serviced. This keeps radios and baseband hardware from being able to sleep, draining the bat…

Seems like you could mitigate some of that by establishing some kind of clock:

1. wake up & enable radios

2. see if peers are in range

3. gossip updates for 30 sec

4. sleep for 5 minutes

5. repeat

Re: Holepunch Unveils P2P Platform "Pear Runtime"

#55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

The fact that you are using loaded words (stolen from the population) and putting words in my mouth (by asserting that I agree with banks getting bailouts) shows that you are absolutely dishonest.

I certainly had no intention of attempting to put words in your mouth, but I believe the words you wrote have the implications that I highlighted.

I disagree that I am being dishonest. I stand by the fact that the money is stolen. Bank rescues are financed through the monetisation of government debt, this causes monetary debasement which directly confiscates purchasing power of those who hold the money, without their permission. This fits the definition of theft.

Re: Holepunch Unveils P2P Platform "Pear Runtime"

#56
post #16

This looks exciting and I'm pleased to see more and more frictionless ways of making p2p apps. I've been building a somewhat similar hobby project [1] that aims to connect peers in the browser by piggybacking on open protocols out on the net (BitTorrent, MQTT, Nostr, IPFS, etc). This project seems to be using Hyperswarm which I've looked at for use as a peering medium but it seems like it's not supported in the brows…

Thanks for building trystero. Fun and easy p2p in browser.
Post reply on HN