Re: (dis)advantages of DC-Net vs remailers

["James A. Donald" <jamesd@netcom.com>]

On Mon, 6 Feb 1995, Wei Dai wrote:
 
> I think over the long run the last factor will be most important.  In 
> a DC-Net, for each bit one participant wants to send to another, EVERY
> OTHER participant must broadcast a bit to ALL participants.  I can 
> imagine a remailer-net with one million users, but I don't see any 
> possibility that a DC-Net can be scaled to that size.

Not so -- you merely have to broadcast to enough people.  
But then the topology, and hence the complexity, gets worse.

This however merely reduces the bandwidth waste from n^2 to n*lg(n)


A further wrinkle -- forming DC nets of DC nets, can reduce the
bandwidth waste to lg(n)^2, which should scale adequately to cover
the cosmos, but then the complexity gets really scary.

And when you try to figure how to deal with denial of service
attacks in a big DC net that tries to use bandwidth with
tolerable efficiency -- I don't know if anyone has figured out
what would be involved -- I certainly have not.


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