Grapevine Technical Overview

Bram Cohen bram@bitconjurer.org
Wed, 22 May 2002 12:39:37 -0700 (PDT)


Someone sent me this from an anonymous email account, asking me to forward
it to the list, since bluesky isn't set up to accept anonymous mail.

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Jim McCoy writes:
> Part of my curiosity about Grapevine is that it seems to be a weird
> hybrid of MojoNation/Mnet and Freenet.  I am still trying to figure
> out what problems it solves that are not already solved by one or the
> other system.

Freenet doesn't work.  The theory has never been verified and in practice
it runs as a full broadcast network.  It has long passed the point of
scalability and is now completely unusable.  Most nodes are instantly
rejecting 99%+ of requests because they are overloaded.

MojoNation never worked either.

Even if Grapevine does no more than what Freenet and MonoJantion promised
to do, it will be a huge step forward if it actually succeeds.

> >    * Search 
>
> This is the hard part for decentralized networks and one which I think
> than Freenet work solved better than others.  Information about
> proposed solutions to the decentralized search problem would be really
> appreciated.

On the contrary, Freenet has no capabilities for search, and has no
design for search that anyone agrees is likely to work.