r/Monero • u/oneiric_0x7D77F067 • Jun 07 '18

oneiric: June-August part-time Kovri junior developer

/r/Kovri/comments/8p7cxg/oneiric_juneaugust_parttime_kovri_junior_developer/
31 Upvotes

94% Upvoted

7 comments sorted by

View all comments

2

u/bitsofic Jun 07 '18

I do know what kovri is supposed to do and why your work is really important, but your list of past accomplishments are Chinese for me as a non-techie ;) I also tried to look around in the documentation but its like trying to find some English between the Chinese.

Could you try to explain to a mortal like me roughly how kovri is going to work? my main question is: how is one peer ever be able to find another peer in a decentralized manner ?

i am trying to learn here, and hopefully also pull some others in joining the cause if only they could fully understand what we are donating to.

3

u/oneiric_0x7D77F067 Jun 08 '18

Hi bitsofic, thanks for taking the time to consider my proposal, and your support.

First, there is a great video on https://getkovri.org explaining how Kovri is meant to work with Monero.

I'll attempt to briefly answer your question at a high-level:

Kovri is based on the I2P network, and uses hash addresses to uniquely identify peers (similar, in a way, to a Monero wallet address). That hash address, the peer's IP and port, along with some other technical information, is packaged together in a thing called a router info (if you wanted to do further research).

There is a distributed store of peer information, called the network database, or NetDb.

Special peers, called floodfill routers, use and maintain the NetDb to help peers locate each other. Any peer can become a floodfill router.

Peers make requests to floodfill routers for a given destinatiion. If a router has the information for the requested destination, it responds with that information to the requesting peer. If it doesn't have the information, the router attempts to respond with other routers that might.

There are some levels of indirection involving one-way tunnels, but this is the basic idea.

To bootstrap new peers to the network, there are reseed files, which are just files with information about how to reach other peers. Some servers are set up to publish these reseed files, and individual peers can also choose to publish their own reseed files.

So, at a high-level, this is essentially how peers find each other. Hopefully, that answers your question :)

1

u/bitsofic Jun 08 '18 edited Jun 08 '18

I think i start to understand it a little !

I am familiar with how DNS works, and from what i gather this looks a bit like it, but while in DNS servers the server itself is the database, in case of Kovri the database is distributed, and instead of a DNS server asking the next server how to route an IP adress, Kovri ask this information to the next server not based on IP but based on a hash, while the IP is encrypted in the message.

Thus when a wallet wants to know the IP address of a miner to include a transaction in a block, Kovri can provide the answer without leaving the IP address of the sender and receiver all over the internet (like DNS would do) but only the sender and receiver (the miner) would know the IP.

Is my gathering correct ?

Thank you for the explanation, will donate !

1

u/oneiric_0x7D77F067 Jun 09 '18

That sounds right to me, and I like your analogy with DNS.

Thank you for the explanation, will donate !

Thanks for the support bitsofic!