[tor-dev] Interoperation with libp2p

[Jeff Burdges]

I work on a project that selected libp2p, but only write cryptographic code, not networking code..  I’d caution against using libp2p for anything serious.

Protocol Labs always took a pretty sophomoric approach:  libp2p managed to be better than ethereum’s but ignored almost everyone working in that space.  It devp2p.  IPFS might still be inferior to Tahoe LAFS in real terms, especially due to lacking erasure coding.

At some point Protocol Labs spun off libp2p, and by then its core devs recognized many of the underlying mistakes.  It also benefits from considerable interest but I think our stronger networking people remain unimpressed. 

It’ always possible to learn from their mistakes of course, but I suspect tor people learned most of those lessons from I2P’s efforts.  


Now libp2p doing their own scheme for sending their stuff over Tor’s existing streams makes sense.  Maybe someone would even pay Tor folk a support contract for the assistance designing that?

We've a relatively low bar for grants up to 30k EUR, and more carefully evaluate ones up to 100k EUR, so if any Tor people want to submit a grant for improving the rust libp2p’s Tor usage, then I’ll ask for it to be supported:  
  https://github.com/w3f/General-Grants-Program/
  https://github.com/libp2p/rust-libp2p

I advise against allowing any libp2p cruft into tor itself though.


> On 10 Nov 2021, at 16:26, Mike Mestnik <cheako+torproject_org at mikemestnik.net> wrote:
> https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/core/torspec/-/issues/64