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twister - a P2P microblogging platform

Miguel Freitas

2013 · arXiv

Security & cryptographyDistributed systemsEconomics
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From the abstract

This paper proposes a new microblogging architecture based on peer-to-peer networks overlays. The proposed platform is comprised of three mostly independent overlay networks. The first provides distributed user registration and authentication and is based on the Bitcoin protocol. The second one is a Distributed Hash Table (DHT) overlay network providing key/value storage for user resources and tracker location for the third network. The last network is a collection of possibly disjoint "swarms" of followers, based on the Bittorrent protocol, which can be used for efficient near-instant notification delivery to many users. By leveraging from existing and proven technologies, twister provides a new microblogging platform offering security, scalability and privacy features. A mechanism provides incentive for entities that contribute processing time to run the user registration network, rewarding such entities with the privilege of sending a single unsolicited ("promoted") message to the entire network. The number of unsolicited messages per day is defined in order to not upset users.

Metadata: arXiv. Abstracts retain their original authors’ rights.

In the conversation

Original HN comments, with labels from simple text rules. A label describes the whole comment and may miss context or irony. Read the discussion to make up your own mind. About the labels

5 selected excerpts · 5 total mentions

kemonocode
Neutral mention · rule
My contributions to Twister are relatively minor- mostly focused towards UI/UX stuff, something I personally loathe, but figured it'd be good learning. Also, out of all projects that itch for a nail to smash with the Bitcoin hammer, it's one of the few that make the most sense to me. The reasoning to use a Bitcoin-based protocol for the auth layer is detailed in the whitepaper [1] but it's basically in order to have unique identities tied to a given username while still remaining decentralized. Just like with Bitcoin, there's Proof of Work needed to perform these validations, but instead of getting paid in coin, whoever finds a block has a chance to get a given message…
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promoted for people to find more easily on their client. Does it scale? I'm not sure myself, it's working pretty well right now, but it certainly scales way better than using Bitcoin for every damn thing. In theory, you could use different protocols to those the original developer chose for all three layers since they're mostly independent (the user registration/auth layer, the DHT layer for messages themselves and the BitTorrent swarm layer for distribution and notification) [1] https://arxiv.org/abs/1312.7152
Original comment Show HN: P2P decentralized messaging application over Bitcoin Cash
lazaroclapp
Neutral mention · rule
To be fair, the most over-engineered blog I know of is anything hosted on top of this: http://arxiv.org/abs/1312.7152 ;) "This paper proposes a new microblogging architecture based on peer-to-peer networks overlays. The proposed platform is comprised of three mostly independent overlay networks. The first provides distributed user registration and authentication and is based on the Bitcoin protocol. The second one is a Distributed Hash Table (DHT) overlay network providing key/value storage for user resources and tracker location for the third network. The last network is a collection of possibly disjoint “swarms” of followers, based on the Bittorrent protocol,..." (and I am sure someone will come up with an example of a blogging platform that starts at the level of specialized mesh networking hardware or something like that...)
Original comment Presenting the Most Over-Engineered Blog Ever

Keep following the thread.

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