Grapevine Technical Overview

Stephen Blackheath stephen@blacksapphire.com
Thu, 23 May 2002 10:12:06 +1200


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Oskar & everyone,

Anonymous writes:
> > 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.

On Thu, 23 May 2002 08:56, Oskar Sandberg wrote:
> If Grapevine does it FIRST, then it will be a huge step forward (maybe).
> We are all vapourware here...

The Grapevine (the project that Anthony Jones, Ross Smith and I are building) 
is most definitely vapourware, and the only proof of it is a small experiment 
I did last year in which I showed to my own satisfaction (and obviously also 
Ross's and Anthony's) that the basic principle of the routing works - that 
is, messages routed through the network reach their destination 100% of the 
time (in my SMALL experiment).

I want to make it absolutely clear that I honestly do not care whose system 
achieves success first, and Anthony definitely feels that way.  That is why I 
have gone to so much trouble to make the technical aspects of Grapevine 
accessible.  I imagine that some time in the future, all our current efforts 
will be obsolete, and another system composed of the best parts of all of 
them will triumph.

The mass media is happy to declare that peer to peer is dead, because that 
idea suits the copyright industry that owns it.  But of course there are some 
very successful non-anonymizing systems, such as FastTrak (Morpheus, Kazaa, 
...) and E-Donkey.

To a large extend what we are trying to achieve now is credibility for the 
technology itself - "third-generation P2P" if you will.  That in turn will 
encourage more technical innovation, just as I was inspired by the great work 
of Ian Clarke, Scott Miller, and Oskar Sandberg of the Freenet project.


Steve
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