For an application that claims to be "private and encrypted", the lack of available source code doesn't inspire much confidence. Why should I put trust in them?
With no mission statement or philosophy about data privacy or content filtering it's just appears to me as another for-profit company with no ethical stand point, pass.
It's actually really great. In many cases P2P failed, because of lack of ways to transfer value, compared to centralized services. P2P + LN might be the way for P2P renaissance.
It's also a better and more correct way to use bitcoin just as money, and not as some kind of ownership token, which plagues the web3 scene. The core purpose of money is to be interoperable, to allow all kinds of goods and services to be traded in a common unit and payment network.
When I chat to my friends and family the last thing I want to do is "transfer value". My bank app allows me to send money to my friends and family in seconds and to create quick payment requests as well.
Perhaps this app is just for blockchain people? If it's another Internet of Coins app then that explains the vague website and the lack of things like privacy policies.
I do find it funny that they've added rules about linking to their website to their terms and conditions. As if they have any right to control the way people link to them.
I use dedicated banking apps to "transfer value" because they're easy to use, secure, developed by a party I trust, and have legal protection from by law.
I get it, shittier countries don't have easy (or any) access to good banks. I still maintain that these value transfers should be done through their separate, secured and verified apps, no matter the transaction mechanism. Send money in the form of NFTs if that's what you want, but do so through an app that's built to do so securely, not some random NodeJS chat app.
Hell, because of the peer to peer nature of this thing, people's contacts can easily be tracked by the government. Good luck convincing the tax auditor that you didn't in fact send your parents a bunch of money when they have the connection logs to show it, enjoy paying unscrupulous taxes to your oppressive government. I'll take my alternative payment system offline or through a trusted third party server, thank you very much.
Agreed! P2P Comms + P2P Payments completes the digital revolution in publishing! That being said, I hope they open source the platform and the community introduces many payment options - including more traditional CC processing. Venmo, Cashapp, Zelle integrations would be insane!
Any mention of bitcoins typically means a full-on commitment to cryptocurrencies.
And I don't think I was wrong, because found out only later that this is funded by Tether and Bitfinex. The actual purpose of this project seems to be to pump the value of the owner's cryptocurrencies. So a hard pass from me.
I do not understand your view point. This does not make "Keet" bad software. It is actually a good idea regarding decentralization. So why the red flag? How does this "pump" the value of crypto? A pump always refers to a manipulation of the market. If people use it, and it is the next "killer app" the value of crypto would indeed rise but for valid reasons.
Don't get me wrong. I am nutural towards bitfinex. Haven't had to deal with them until now. I would wait how the project develops and then maybe give it a chance.
> It is actually a good idea regarding decentralization.
I absolutely agree: hypercore, their DHT and holepunching work is excellent.
My frustration stems from the fact that nothing in the innovative part of Keet needs cryptocurrencies. Now "pump" was the wrong term there. I meant cryptocurrency businesses are trying desperately to find any semi legitimate use cases for their tech becauae if they do, that'll cause the value of the coins they own to go up, and thus making them richer. Without that awkwardly bolted on Bitcoin nonsense in Keet neither of the funding companies would have given them a dime.
The red flag is because the good of keet does not negate the bad of promoting cryptocurrencies. Cryptocurrencies are a technological dead end, politically totally against everything I stand for, and morally bankrupt wrt the ecological disaster that is PoW and the pyramid scheme with the already powerful and or wealthy reaping even more for themselves.
I appreciate that suggestion but I found when a development team doesn't adhere to a public statement of trust they can take any direction they'd like without accountability to their actions.
I think the use of P2P like DHT is very smart, but like others I am wary due to the source.
As best I can tell:
Hypercore = company without a website? I can't find one.
Holepunch = platform made by Hypercore - again no website? Funded by Tether and Bitfinex
Keet = First app that uses Holepunch
Based on the amount of funding that Tether and Bitfinex are putting into this, this does not appear to be a neutral technology.
Hypercore: protocol, predates the Tether/Bitfinex stuff, I'd argue neutral. The Beaker Browser work was incredibly cool IMO. Website: https://hypercore-protocol.org/
The fact that they didn't shoehorn a token or blockchain into the app's design is amazing and refreshing. Blockchains are a terrible solution for 99.9% of problems. The ONLY reason a vast majority of projects incorporate a token is to enrich the founders. Hats off
Supporting Bitcoin in any way is a sign that they are incapable of detecting scams that will destroy life on earth, which is a bad sign for them dealing with other scams or ethical dilemmas.
How is an open, permissionless financial network that uses a fraction of a % of the world's energy a scam that will destroy life on Earth? Uninformed, hyperbolic statements about Bitcoin is a sign you're incapable of basic understanding of anything.
To be explicit, one problem with Bitcoin's energy use is that it has the potential to consume any excess energy-producing capacity that we free up by making technology more energy efficient. It could use any fossil fuel-powered energy production that otherwise might be obsoleted by green energy sources. Bitcoin and other PoW blockchains add a strong financial incentive to use all available energy production capacity to its limit. Certainly it is difficult to imagine the market encouraging e.g. carbon capture when the same unit of energy could be used to mine Bitcoin instead for more "profit". (Not that I think carbon capture is likely to make much of a difference, given that simply not releasing greenhouse gases in the first place is always more efficient.)
If energy efficiency and green energy sources will not suffice to reduce our burning of fossil fuels, due in part to Bitcoin and its ilk, then the only way to avoid climate catastrophe would be simply doing less, a.k.a. degrowth. I leave it as an exercise for the reader to imagine what the typical cryptocurrency advocate thinks of degrowth. (But that would interfere with the numbers going up!)
In short, Bitcoin is a major roadblock to any response to the climate crisis, using any strategy.
Completely untrue. The amount of money miners spend on bitcoin mining per unit time will never be higher than the value of bitcoin block rewards per unit time.
The block reward gets cut in half every couple years. Right now it’s $18M/day, and at its peak it was $60 million per day. Assuming the price of btc doesn’t shoot back up, that puts an upper limit on the amount of money spent by miners on electricity at $60M/day. To put that number in perspective, the US alone spends $3B/day on energy.
And as a typical cryptocurrency advocate, I always find it amusing when HN programmers, probably in the richest 1% of the world globally, talk about how the line going up even more just isn’t really that important. It already went up for you, maybe we should ask people in brazil or in the philippines or in subsaharan africa if they want their line to go up.
> that we free up by making technology more energy efficient
This is 100% a fake problem that clearly does not exist if you understood anything about the energy market. Civilization is at an increasing rate consuming more electricity. Surely, someone who believes carbon emissions are destroying the planet would agree we need to electrify everything. Bitcoin consuming and therefore monetizing stranded and/or temporary excess amounts of energy make accelerated electrification of our society a much more realistic endeavor. Having an electricity dung-beetle, a buyer of last resort, is a revelation.
Bitcoin doesn't discriminate between green energy sources and fossil fuel energy sources. It encourages production/consumption of fossil fuels just as much as it encourages production/consumption of green energy sources. There's no particular reason to believe that Bitcoin will accelerate electrification.
> Bitcoin doesn't discriminate between green energy sources and fossil fuel energy sources.
BINGO!
If you have something that will buy any left over or unusable stock of product X, the production of X becomes less risky and easier to invest in. This isn't hard. Bitcoin incentivizes energy production and innovation. If you want that energy to be green, bitcoin is still more than willing to buy it from you. Lowering the risk of innovation in the space is obviously good for green energy.
No, this doesn't make sense. If your goal is to reduce fossil fuel usage, and Bitcoin also incentivizes fossil fuels, then there's no reason to expect that Bitcoin will help reduce the share of energy produced by fossil fuels. Worse yet, if it increases total energy consumption, and doesn't affect the percentage produced by fossil fuels, then that will increase the absolute amount of greenhouse gas emissions.
Your arguments work just as well for reducing risk for investing in "marginal" fossil fuel sources.
Bitcoin incentivizes cheap energy production. We need more cheap energy.
Bitcoin does nothing to alter or effect other incentives or disincentives on energy production.
Assuming prices are equivalent, it's net neutral on production mix. However, we've been told renewable energy is cheaper! Therefore it accelerates its adoption.
I subsidized a rather large solar installation on my farm by mining with the excess electricity. This installation drastically lowers my reliance on the grid.
Bitcoin miners flock to where the energy is cheapest, where it can't be used for anything else, namely stranded renewables. If the energy source can be used for anything else, it is probably too expensive for Bitcoin miners, who are a buyer of last resort. Bitcoin provides a financial incentive for infrastructure build out for these stranded energy sources.
You've made your arguement for "planet destroying", now why is it a "scam"?
One aspect I must mention is Bitcoin miners flock to where energy is cheapest for them, not taking into account negative externalities. This is why you see miners attacking CI services to try to use them for mining crypto: free energy is the best deal, even if it is costly to someone else: https://drewdevault.com/2021/04/26/Cryptocurrency-is-a-disas...
Of course, the climate crisis is caused in large part by capitalism failing to deal with negative externalities, so one could argue that Bitcoin is just another facet of our corrupt system privatizing benefits and making the public bear the costs. But nevertheless this is a fundamental flaw in arguments that Bitcoin miners only farm where energy is "cheapest".
Bitcoin is my and millions of others store of value, it is definately decentralized and is definitely private if used properly. I don't touch any "cryptos".
Completely agree. Energy consumption is what enables human flourishing. Quite frankly, "Energy consumption = bad" is pro-human suffering. The lack of nuance in that argument is tiresome.
Humans benefit from using energy, but our current energy systems release terrifying amounts of greenhouse gases. Continued global heating will involve mass death, and a great deal of human suffering along the way. Energy use is necessary to support human life, but limiting energy use is vital to avoid climate catastrophe. It's not a fun problem to have, but you can't wish it away by saying "but people need and enjoy energy!" Of course they do, that's why we need to limit energy use, so that they can enjoy energy in the future, rather than suffering the complete collapse of the systems that allow them to enjoy energy.
You are wrong. You will have incredibly realtime examples of how dangerous this way of thinking is when winter hits Europe this year. Energy is life. It's not a "nice to have" or something people "enjoy".
What part of "Energy use is necessary to support human life" did you not understand when I said it?
Do you understand that heat waves, flooding, forest fires, and other extreme weather events will interfere with the delivery of energy? Do you understand that water shortages will interfere with the delivery of energy (e.g. nuclear power plants need water for cooling)? Do you understand that resource wars will interfere with the delivery of energy? Do you understand that climate change preventing food from growing will interfere with the survival of the people who deliver the energy?
Of course energy is vital to human existence, I recommend e.g. Energy and Civilization by Vaclav Smil to anyone who wants to understand this in great detail: https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/energy-and-civilization But the climate crisis will interfere with energy production and delivery, just as it interferes with everything else that humans want or need to do. Refusing to reduce energy usage voluntarily will result in involuntary reduction in energy usage as systems fail.
> limiting energy use is vital to avoid climate catastrophe.
This is what I have issue with. Energy use benefits humanity. Full stop.
If you said civilization needs bananas to survive and flourish, then some good samaritan came along and said "I will always buy any leftover bananas you can't sell no matter where or when you grow them", you would get many more banana farms, people experimenting with new banana growing/harvesting technology, etc. It's an undeniable benefit if your goal is to produce more bananas.
I'll try a simple analogy: imagine that your goal is to consume as much corn as possible. (A silly goal for many reasons, but that's a different discussion.) You have all of the corn that you've grown to eat, and then there's the seed corn you would need to plant in order to eat more corn in the future. If you decide to eat the seed corn as well, you will eat more corn in the immediate future, and then much less corn after that. Clearly limits to consumption are sometimes necessary in order to maximize consumption over the long term, even if you grant the premise that maximizing consumption is desirable.
Terrible analogy. Energy production requires large upfront investments in infrastructure. There is nothing analogous to seed in energy. There are only farms and corn that expires extremely quickly and is hard to transport.
Integration is totally fine, and I think payments are a very valid use-case. But the app doesn't rely on a blockchain or have a token to achieve its core functionality.
> Supporting Bitcoin in any way is a sign that they are incapable of detecting scams that will destroy life on earth
Well, we couldn't disagree more there. A focus on bitcoin while ignoring other crypto scams shows a great deal of sophistication, understanding of the space, and moral fortitude.
What's the privacy story like. Does running this expose the IP addresses I use it from to the entire network, and does it associate my username with it? How is multi device support? How does P2P work on systems like iOS and GPlay where notifications need to go through a central communications hub? How does the P2P system respond to slow networks?
On the business side: Why did they try to trademark a common networking term ("holepunch")? Why did they add a whole section labeled "Rules about linking to our Site" to the terms of service, are they in the business of shutting down customers who leave bad reviews or write bad negative posts?
As for competition, how is this better than slapping a blockchain onto any other messenger?
In my experience your P2P experience is only as good as the connections the slowest/unreliable peer node. It works well in spurts but wen you start adding more participants the performance degrades and becomes unstable.
its not really a solvable problem with just clever networking but something that AI needs to take over in terms of upping and filling in the gaps from the network limitations (resolution upping, deepfake like techniques)
i'm still under the impression that SFU And centralized servers is the only way to deliver massive scaling and consistent performance and even this is not perfect.
> Holepunch is a platform for creating apps that don’t use any servers whatsoever.
Ew; punny and/or topical names are fine, but just grabbing a term of art and using it for your product is 1. anti-social behaviour, and 2. not even a good idea selfishly, since you'll have an awful time trademarking it.
It makes sense for a peer to peer networking system to advertise its hole punching capabilities in their name. Many people still don't have IPv6 yet so hole punching will remain a necessity for a while.
As long as they don't try to enforce any stupid trademarks over a common term like that I don't see the problem.
Keet is unbelievably user friendly with the best video and audio quality I’ve experienced on any network comms app (looking at you Zoom, Signal, WhatsApp, Google Meet…) maybe only FaceTime can hold something of a candle. What’s blowing my mind about Keet is that the quality is so good AND it’s 100% P2P, E2EE, and allows sharing large files (e.g. videos) in the chat that can be streamed as if they were already on my device. The UX is top tier, the features are beyond elite - who can even compete? I cannot wait for them to open source the platform, the internet of peers is upon us!
1. Looks like you're not using libp2p, why? (Not accusing, just wondering)
2. What is your fallback mechanism when hole punching isn't possible? Relay nodes?
3. Follow-up: how do you ensure an acceptable QoS (latency, bandwidth, time to peer-discovery etc) for that fallback mechanism?
4. How do you handle many participants? Amount of chatter scales n^2 by default in p2p.
5. What application bundler are you using (eg electron)?
6. Bonus: what technical challenges were hardest? Any big unsolved problems?
Thank you.