biolizard89 wrote:Maybe we're ignoring this because it's so obvious, but Freenet support remains unimplemented even though it's in the .bit spec. Is there any interest in implementing Freenet support? If they handle proxies in a sane way it might be pretty straightforward.
Any enhancement is helping Namecoin and this enhancement help the freedom of information also and if you feel particularly interested or you know it's source code then you are welcome to do it.
However I think we could find a better option for distributed storage to implement for now. I guess also it is not so easy to implement Freenet support. If we would have 10 another active developers like you and domob then somebody could start implementing it.
But if we are by implementing connection to existing distributed networks with (distributed or non-distributed) storage or let us see some details:
eMule - 3-4 million users in average and 670 million downloads - not anonymous, open source, distributed network and content
Tor - 100-200 thousand users in average - anonymous, open source, distributed network
Freenet - 20-40 thousand users in average - anonymous, open source, distributed network and content
I2P - 10-15 thousand users in average - anonymous, open source, distributed network
Retroshare - more than 5800 simultaneous P2P users(F2F not covered) - anonymous, open source, distributed network
But it is hard to compare Retroshare with the others as it is not a content network because but it is a software which can be used to construct F2F or P2P distributed content or messaging networks. Only public P2P networks are covered in this statistic not F2F based ones because F2F user number is hard to estimate. However as it was designed more for F2F networking it has presumably more F2F user.
If we suppose that the number of users divided with the weekly downloads is the same by Retroshare then by eMule, then the number of simultaneous users must be around 15-20.000.
Freenet has also a very high latency, which is good for anonymity but bad for usability. (highest anonymity)
Retroshare based networks have probably the highest speed from the anonymous distributed networks where Freenet the slowest.
Another aspect is that Tor is probably more used as proxy then as content storage so if we compare the number of users by content storage then it has probably much less then 100 thousand simultaneous users.
What about implementing eMule support ? eDonkey&Kad also. Not anonymous by design but distributed and highly popular. And iMule is an open source, anonymous eMule port.