Comment on ‘There isn’t really another choice:’ Signal chief explains why the encrypted messenger relies on AWS

• qwerty@discuss.tchncs.de ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

  Tor relays only relay the traffic, they don’t store anything (other than HSDirs, but that’s miniscule). Session relays have to store all the messages, pictures, files until the user comes online and retrieves them. Obviously all that data would be too much to store on every single node, so instead it is spread across only 5-7 nodes at a time. If all of those nodes ware to go offline at the same time, messages would be lost, so there has to be some mechanism that discourages taking nodes offline without giving a notice period to the network. Without the staking mechanism, an attacker could spin up a bunch of nodes and then take them all down for relatively cheap, and leave users’ messages undelivered. It also incentivizes honest operators to ensure their node’s reliability and rewards them for it, which, even if you run your node purely for altruistic reasons, is always a nice bonus, so I don’t really see any downside to it, especially since the end user doesn’t need to interact with it at all.

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  • hanke@feddit.nu ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

    Where does the reward come from?

    Who pays the node maintainers for keeping stable nodes online?

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    • qwerty@discuss.tchncs.de ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

      Inflation, those are new tokens generated by the network, the same way new bitcoin is generated by the miners roughly every 10 minutes, just without the proof of work mining part. It’s called proof of stake, ethereum uses it as well.

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      • hanke@feddit.nu ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

        Okay, does this use a common crypto currency, or how do the node owners “profit” from upholding the service?

        If it has its own cryptocurrency, where can they spend it?

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  • Natanael@infosec.pub ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

    I2P already did that with their DHT network (remember DHT?). I2P Bote uses that for messaging

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    • vacuumflower@lemmy.sdf.org ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

      Eh, no. A DHT doesn’t solve offline storage of data, when the source node is already offline, and the target node is not yet online.

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      • Natanael@infosec.pub ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

        It does temporarily, on the order of hours to days. It’s not designed to use the network for long term storage, just message passing

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  • tengkuizdihar@programming.dev ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

    yet they couldve done this with volunteer nodes or even their own, because not even the server knows the content, right?

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• FauxLiving@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

  Can you think of another way for people across the world to easily pay each other directly?

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  • tengkuizdihar@programming.dev ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

    lokinet is for data transfer, like a message from your phone to mine, not a currency. Thats why its odd it uses staking instead of any nodes.

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    • anomnom@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

      Sounds like the staking is a way to incentivize individual node uptime. Also you need to pay into the stake to get going so there is some financial pain involved in neglecting, or worse, manipulating it. Though is sounds like €1000 per node, so it’s not really going to slow down governments or billion dollar commercial competitors.

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      • FauxLiving@lemmy.world ⁨23⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

        It’s also a way that people can contribute to the network without needing third party payment services. I don’t need to find some node operator’s socials and look up a patron to use a credit card.

        If I already have an account with a crypto exchange then it’s easy to pay the operators.

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