[HN Gopher] Holepunch Unveils P2P Platform "Pear Runtime"
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       Holepunch Unveils P2P Platform "Pear Runtime"
        
       Author : yosoyubik
       Score  : 25 points
       Date   : 2024-02-14 19:21 UTC (3 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (pears.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (pears.com)
        
       | macawfish wrote:
       | Are there any plans to support mobile platforms?
        
         | altruios wrote:
         | mobile platforms have some unique challenges for P2P stuff,
         | from what I looked into back in the day.
         | 
         | https://www.researchgate.net/publication/200753717_Challenge...
         | 
         | (from 2009)
         | 
         | P2P stuff is really hard.
        
           | Uptrenda wrote:
           | 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.
        
             | chatmasta wrote:
             | You'll face a lot of those problems on residential ISP
             | connections too. The bigger issue with mobile devices is
             | that they're roaming between towers, so there are frequent
             | changes to the network topology. But p2p networks usually
             | require a long-ish bootstrapping step that might not even
             | finish by the time the physical network shifts underneath
             | it. (Tor bootstrapping takes on the order of ~30 seconds,
             | for example.) As the linked paper notes, this is disruptive
             | not only to the local client, but also to the rest of the
             | network that needs to re-learn (and re-propagate) the
             | location of mobile peers.
        
             | api wrote:
             | 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 battery faster.
             | 
             | Mobile devices almost always have IPv6 on cell networks
             | these days, which makes the actual hole punching almost
             | 100% successful.
        
       | treyd wrote:
       | > Created by Holepunch, a Tether-backed company
       | 
       | Is this the same Tether as in the USDT stablecoin that's been
       | accused of pumping up the volume in Bitcoin markets and possibly
       | being secretly insolvent?
        
         | meragrin_ wrote:
         | Seems so.
         | 
         | https://tether.to/en/tether-bitfinex-and-hypercore-launch-ho...
        
         | ursuscamp wrote:
         | The same company. The claims about pumping Bitcoin are
         | ridiculous, but being secretly insolvent? It seems unlikely at
         | this point, but maybe.
        
         | Uptrenda wrote:
         | This seems like an unneeded attempt to try politicalize a
         | technical innovation...
        
         | humbleferret wrote:
         | Genuine curiosity: What's the issue with a company being backed
         | by Tether?
         | 
         | I understand that, as it stands today, Holepunch appears to be
         | operated or contributed to by several staff members from
         | Bitfinex and Tether. However, if Holepunch is open source and
         | Tether were to implode, Holepunch would still exist and could
         | be adopted by anyone, irrespective of Tether/Bitfinex, etc.,
         | correct?
        
           | rockooooo wrote:
           | Open-source projects where all the developers work for one
           | company tend not to do too well when that company dies,
           | especially if there isn't a large ecosystem around the
           | software yet.
        
       | humbleferret wrote:
       | I've been following Holepunch developments for a while. There
       | does not seem too much publicly available about who's building
       | with it, but I personally regularly use Holepunch's Keet[1] for
       | video calls with friends in parts of the world with censored
       | Internet. I'm able to chat with voice and image quality
       | surpassing anything else I've used.
       | 
       | [1] https://keet.io/
        
         | Uptrenda wrote:
         | It's frigging cool. It's super hard to make a meaningful model
         | for p2p applications because they need all kinds of data
         | structures that are research tier or have scarce real-world
         | data. It's not just connectivity that's hard. If they manage to
         | do everything decentralized and create meaningful constructs.
         | This could be the start of actually realizing all the rhetoric
         | these kind of projects have been promising. This seems to have
         | technical merit, imo.
        
           | diggan wrote:
           | Feels like creating small, ephemeral groups is an easier part
           | of p2p too, so it fits that particular use case well.
        
       | dmotz wrote:
       | 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 browser. I'd love to implement it if that story changes
       | since it's so easy to distribute apps on the web.
       | 
       | [1] https://github.com/dmotz/trystero/
        
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       (page generated 2024-02-14 23:00 UTC)