Comment by gspr
5 days ago
> It could be so cool. Decentralized, medium-agnostic, meshing. The spirit of the old web, transported partially via LoRa radio, partially via fiber and partially via pigeon (optional) without you as the user noticing.
I dream of these things, too. Could you recommend a solid summary of why Reticulum is broken by design? I've only viewed it from a distance, and the idea looks great. But I see a lot of comments like yours, and I'd like to understand.
I am by no means an expert, so please someone correct me if I'm wrong.
But the problem is that the whole core identity mechanism is built on asymmetric crypto, that is safe now but will not be safe in the future. And because it's in that core layer, you cannot just "upgrade" your crypto.
The network collapses permanently and very much un-gracefully once that cryptography is no longer secure.
This.. apparently(?) was done to reduce overhead for usage with e.g. LoRa(?), but that makes the whole thing a forever prototype that can never truly be used beyond being a niche art project.
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You also don't really have a way to kick bad actors out without completely recreating your network, which is.. not ideal. You can make that work, but as soon as a single node is compromised, you have to re-provision all of the rest within the network.
That's because they just share a single secret to become that specific closed network.
> But the problem is that the whole core identity mechanism is built on asymmetric crypto, that is safe now but will not be safe in the future. And because it's in that core layer, you cannot just "upgrade" your crypto.
Alright, but that's fine for now. It's still really cool as a basis for resilient, decentralized networks. Maybe one day it'll have to be replaced by something else. Right now, it looks really valuable as an experience-gaining tool the way I see it.
> but that makes the whole thing a forever prototype that can never truly be used beyond being a niche art project.
Prototype, maybe. Niche art project? Disagree! It looks like a very interesting exploration of an underexplored space to me.
> You also don't really have a way to kick bad actors out without completely recreating your network, which is.. not ideal. You can make that work, but as soon as a single node is compromised, you have to re-provision all of the rest within the network.
Can you elaborate? I'm not sure I understand.
> That's because they just share a single secret to become that specific closed network.
Is that really true?
> share a single secret to become that specific closed network
No? Pretty sure that isn't true.
You get an address by creating a random private key public key combination (no collisions are ensured by entropy).
You then send an announce packet over all the connections to other nodes you have. This packet tells everyone else how to reach you and that you exist. To send packets to you they send to the connection they got your announce came from, then the node on the other end of that connection sends to where it got the announce from and so on until it reaches the origin node where the destination must be.
The manual at https://reticulum.network/manual/index.html is the best source of information on Reticulum but it isn't very beginner friendly.
Uh idk man. Saying "no that's not true" followed by "I actually have no idea how that works" followed by "read the manual."
Maybe just don't?
You clearly did not understand what I said, because whatever routing stuff you've mentioned is unrelated to my point.
Which, if I wanted to be snarky, I would say could be found in the manual you've pointed to: https://reticulum.network/manual/understanding.html#network-...
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Look, I want reticulum to be cool as much as you do, but this is not the way. Reality unfortunately isn't that.
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And, frankly, the docs are not necessarily _complicated_. They're just not good, because they're meandering prose written by Mark for himself. Which is, again, fine, but not by itself an indicator of "clever".
The guy clearly _is_ clever but not because of his writing being near incomprehensible.