Reticulum is an elegant engineers approach to networking. It’s a complete replacement of the network stack, it’s entirely encrypted, and can communicate and can correctly organize global-scale mesh-networks over any connection >5b/s without the need for distributed hash tables, or any resource usage besides bandwidth. This makes it far lighter than GNUnet, and friendly to low-power, low bandwidth, embedded networks and devices.
This makes it viable as a global network, as it is super cheap to interact with. And it can run on any device, including your smartphone natively.
Bandwidth is a physical resource of the natural world. Reticulum is based on the principle of creating systems that (as far as is possible for a computer program) understand the physical limits of real-world resources, and manages them responsibly and intelligently, with well-thought out algorithms.
When that is ultimately not possible any more, human beings have to step in and expand capacity or make other thoughtful decisions on how to manage the available resources. I believe this is the most efficient, holistic and human-friendly approach to creating technologies that actually help us and better our lives.
- someone from forums
@boxy tell me if I’m missing something, but it seems like maintaining routing tables won’t scale well.
Here’s my thinking: there’s no hierarchy to destination addresses (I.e. there no equivalent to /16 or /24 subnets), which means every transport node needs to keep track of all the individual addresses instead of just route prefixes. If there are billions of destinations, at 16 bytes each, that would require about 100G of ram.
You could reduce this by maybe a factor of 10 by using a big bloom filter that contains pairs of (address, route). But 10G is still pretty large. And you’d need two of them if you ever wanted to expire old entries.
This project is slowly growing from small personal radio mesh networks. It sounds like you have some interesting points and I’m not sure the devs are truely ready for huge-scale networks. I would highly recommend getting involved if you have something to add.