Oddbean new post about login | logout These are routing nodes, they have in-memory storage and they only store two things: 1. routing table to nodes closer to a target info hash (basically a hash table automatically sharded) 2. small packets of arbitrary (and other non arbitrary but less relevant to Pkarr) data in an LRU cache. Nodes churn all the time and even when they don't churn if their cache is full your data might be evicted. so it is great for censorship resistant routing, not so much for data durability let alone storage of large blobs.
Ok so the DHT is the BitTorrent mainnet but it's only used for small signed DNS packets. What are the chances BT clients filter out these as unwanted traffic?
BEP0044 is a standard, nodes are free not to support it. It is for arbitrary data, our traffic is not any different from any other traffic, if we abuse the network we will get rate limited like any other spammed. That being said we are doing our best to avoid abusing the network, by heavily caching packets with large TTL values. There is a possibility that nodes might filter out packets that look like DNS, but first they don't have incentive for that, we are not hammering them or costing them much, second that will require a software updated distributed to millions of clients, not very likely, in fact networks like this have the opposite problem: legacy.