Channels/Decentralized
Lots of projects claim to be decentralized. It is important to disclose exactly where this project is and what the remaining limitations are.
Towards that end, we will note some points about this project and answer what can be done about them and what the limiting factors are.
The objective is to have this project completely decentralized, where no one entity could take down the network.
Contents
Awesomesauce
The DHT (Distrubted Hash Table) design is designed for a very large number of nodes and channels. It should be very hard to disrupt.
There is no centralized system for channel registration, user control or anything else. There is a mechanism to register names on the Snowblossom block chain, but that it decentralized itself.
Limitations
Seed Nodes
Currently all the seed nodes used for the DHT are run by Fireduck. We should add some diversity. If all the seed nodes were unreachable or down new nodes would be unable to join the DHT and wouldn't be able to find peers for channels.
Fixes:
- Add more seeds - https://github.com/snowblossomcoin/channels/issues/18
- Add multicast DHT discovery - https://github.com/snowblossomcoin/channels/issues/15
IP Address Discovery
Currently, nodes reach out to an app in Google App Engine in order to discover their own IPv4 and IPv6 public addresses. See: https://github.com/snowblossomcoin/channels/blob/master/src/NetworkExaminer.java
If this broke, nodes would be unable to announce themselves as peers on the network.
Fixes:
- Improve address detection: https://github.com/snowblossomcoin/channels/issues/16
snowchannel.io hosting
The proxy implementatation points x.snowblossom.io to a channel where x is the channel identifier. To help with that. *.snowblossom.io is a publicly reachable site that tells people to fix their proxy settings. It is hosted on CloudFront/S3.
If this went away, people would get timeouts or other errors when their proxy settings were not set correct. Not a huge deal.
Source Control
Source control is all on github. Anyone could have a clone, but it is still a single point that would have a big impact on the system if disrupted.
