Kademlia

I never had the chance to understand how IPFS – the magical public network where a bunch of Web3 stuff is stored – worked until now. Now that I finally have the chance (and the excuse) to look into it, however, I can attempt to answer a number of burning questions I had: 1. who pays for storage in IPFS? Is it free for users or what? 2. How does the process of storing and retrieving a file actually work?

Open membership P2P systems are plagued by security issues and DHTs are no exception. In this post, I will try to summarize my understanding of one attempt at mitigating some of the security issues found in the Kademlia DHT in adversarial environments. The resulting work is named S/Kademlia, and it is significant in that it underpins a number of practical DHT implementations, including the libp2p DHT spec.