dominictarr
commented
11 years ago Yes. Many of the ideas are similar, except that cyphernet has a strong emphasis on data replication as the heart of the system.
Storing large amounts of data in a DHT has some problems, like, there is no way to filter spam. Users can push data into the system, and everyone has to store it all.
Compare this with bittorrent, which uses a DHT (in some versions) as a tracker. This is only a small amount of data - which peers are interested in which files - and when you do the real work, you interact only with other peers that are interested in that file. A significant part of the bittorrent exchange protocol is about getting nodes to interact in a way that is mutually beneficial.
https://wiki.theory.org/BitTorrentSpecification#Choking_and_Optimistic_Unchoking
A cyphernet set (as defined by a traversal) roughly equates to a torrent, in that peers interested in that set would interact directly to share that data.
A DHT may be very useful, though, in the way that bittorrent uses it, to keep track of the nodes that are interested in a particular set of data.
Btw did you hear of these guys? https://freenetproject.org/understand.html