Also, was any effort made to make this work in the browser sans browserify? Meaning, can I replace the networking component and maybe put in my own webrtc connector impls and still leverage all the kad stuff ala peer buckets/closeness?

This project isn't possible in current browsers. Browsers just don't expose the interfaces needed. That's why we work on https://beakerbrowser.com/, which is the main project that Hyperswarm was built for.

Stronger PWA support would help a lot, especially in trying to minimize the number of wrappers like Electron and Cordova in the wild.

Certainly most of the interfaces needed aren't high on web platform priorities, and it may not be Beaker's intent yet to push on WHATWG to adopt these technologies more platform-wide, but even the ability to bootstrap the DHT in an ugly, but entirely browser-capable fashion (a dumb REST API bootstrap call to known HTTP endpoints, as one off-the-cuff idea) could do a lot for the kinds of decentralized applications that could be built entirely as PWA with no other application wrapper needed.

libp2p seems to have this goal in mind on their issue tracker, but so far as skimming the issues, I don't think I've seen a timeline for releasing it.

While I agree on the networking front, with pluggable bidirectional networking impl that others can write, the DHT still has value.

I am familiar w/ the Beaker project and definitely appreciate all of y'all's work (I did a much smaller PoC back in the day [0] when I thought MaidSafe had legs). I also definitely understand/appreciate the simplicity of some of the hyperswarm code and also understand fears of overabstraction for external use cases.

0 - https://github.com/cretz/safe-poc-browser

I know there's a BitTorrent BEP for IPv6 support, but I'm not quite sure if that relates to this DHT implementation.

[1] https://github.com/hyperswarm/dht/blob/master/index.js#L4

I am not sure in which part of the code to look for this (is the hole punching part of the dht package?) so any pointers are appreciated

We are planning to blog more about how the internals work. The "first class" hole punching is def one of the features I'm most exciting about.

Or asked differently, what makes Hyperswarm better than Overnet? :)

DHTs are not without their problems. I know some other projects in our space decided it wasn't tenable to solve the Sybil attack and so they created a peer-routing system that bootstraps off of a blockchain. As brad0 pointed out, there have also been performance issues in some deployments. We're going to iterate on the security and performance and see how it goes.

There are few commercial benefits/incentives for a DHT provider and few guarantees p2p tech can give a company requiring an always-on central presence.

> I know some other projects in our space decided it wasn't tenable to solve the Sybil attack and so they created a peer-routing system that bootstraps off of a blockchain.

One approach is to do the S/Kademlia thing where you require all peers to generate IDs (hash of a key) and require the it start with a certain number of 0 bits and then require another random X that, when xor'd w/ the ID, starts with a certain number of 0 bits.

There are quite a few commercial benefits! It's just that nobody's properly banked on them yet. P2P distributes costs, simplifies configuration & ops, and improves data privacy. For the politically-minded, P2P also distributes power more equitably by moving business logic to user devices.

P2P will not remove the need for always-on presences. You need a peer of last resort. However, running a peer will be cheaper and easier than running a server.

> One approach is to do the S/Kademlia thing where you require all peers to generate IDs (hash of a key) and require the it start with a certain number of 0 bits and then require another random X that, when xor'd w/ the ID, starts with a certain number of 0 bits.

We're looking at the crypto-puzzle approach, but there needs to be a work-requirement asymmetry between honest nodes and attackers, which I think is only the case with the Eclipse attacks and not the Sybil attacks. Otherwise, the puzzles only provide security if honest nodes outspend attackers, and we don't want to turn our userbase into mining farms.

That said, it seems like "what makes it better" is that it hasn't received a take-down because this isn't attempting to be a solution for copyright circumvention ;)