TWEETSTORM is an occasional feature on decentralize.today where we share threads , mostly from Twitter, that we think deserve a wider audience, some are informative, some educational, some amusing and others yet are controversial...we dig these out for you so you don't have to!
1/ @bitfinex, @Tether_to and @HypercoreProto today launched Keet, a new P2P chat app w/ #Bitcoin payments support 🦜
— Namcios (@namcios) July 25, 2022
Keet is built on Holepunch, a platform with no blockchain or token that seeks to facilitate the dev of P2P applications 🕳🥊
Here’s all you need to know… 🧵 pic.twitter.com/z4QgXe2lwF
2/ Keet allows a given set of parties to exchange instant video, message and file communications in a truly P2P fashion. The app is launching on ‘alpha’ today, and in the future will integrate #Bitcoin payments on Lightning, as well as $USDT.
3/ Keet’s approach improves upon popular end-to-end encrypted but centralized offerings such as Zoom and WhatsApp because data being shared isn’t forwarded to a central server at any time. Rather, the connection is established purely between the users taking part in the chat.
4/ Keet serves as a demo app of what Holepunch can achieve. Holepunch has been under dev for 3 years and will be fully launched to the public as an open-source SDK in December. It aims to make it easier for developers to build truly P2P apps with the Hypercore stack.
5/ Hypercore is a peer-to-peer data network built on signed, append-only logs. These logs work similarly to a blockchain, but without the consensus algorithm and thus without the need for a global ledger state to be kept by all nodes.
6/ Holepunch makes Hypercore more accessible by abstracting away low-level technical details of the protocol. It simplifies Hypercore’s architecture and enables more people to build apps with it — which allowed a single frontend dev to build Keet in 4 months.
7/ Holepunch forgoes using a blockchain and a native token entirely, enabling distributed apps to be created for scalability with minimal resources. “Instead of relying on a shared blockchain, each user constructs many small data structures” @paoloardoino & @mafintosh told BM.
8/ Keet generates ED25519 key pairs locally. It’ll support HSMs like Ledger in the future. Public keys are announced to Holepunch’s distributed hash table (DHT), an open network of computers that can be used by peers to discover and connect to each other w/o a central server.
9/ When it comes to #Bitcoin , Keet will, through Holepunch, provide primitives to support the P2P payment option in a non-custodial form. BTC and Tether payments are add-on features to provide payment rails for people using apps or that plan to offer services through Holepunch.
10/ The Web3-Contrarian Trend. The creation and development of P2P infrastructure that, despite the Web3 fuss, doesn’t leverage blockchain technology at all is picking up.
Recently, @jack and @TBD54566975 announced Web5.
11/ @paoloardoino & @mafintosh: “Web5 has a more complex and predetermined structure than Holepunch,” the duo told Bitcoin Magazine. “Holepunch provides a set of primitives and the scaffolding to build applications without trying to force specific patterns.”
12/ Holepunch is complementary to @Synonym_to “Synonym could leverage Holepunch to build part of their services in the roadmap. Synonym and Holepunch are not in competition but rather complementary in terms of vision and products they plan to build” - @paoloardoino & @mafintosh
13/ Catch all the details about Keet, Holepunch and how they relate to other decentralized web developments in my latest article for @BitcoinMagazine:
