> What are some notable uses of P2P these days?

Im using it for Payload[1] in for LAN and WAN transfers (if possible). Reduce operational costs (especially if you run on public clouds and have to pay extortion rates for egress) and also you must use it to capitalize on latency/throughput in LAN. Moving data from A->server->B means your need multiple servers on the edge, which means you kinda need to depend on mega-corps. If your destination is closer it’s easier for your application infra. I’d like to reverse the question, why send all data through another machine in the cloud if you don’t need to?

That said, p2p being flaky and bad is real. It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy, because middlebox engineers say ”let’s add these layers of garbage and nobody will notice unless they use p2p but its so bad who uses it anyway”. Well, yeah. It’s worse because of you! Philosophically, I also think p2p is a necessary precondition to a decentralized internet without tiers (ie client and server separation).

Anyway, rant aside, you have to currently have a relay backup if you need availability. P2P will fail often even with the smartest hole punching algorithms. This makes things more complicated, because you need a hybrid solution. However, it’s not as complicated as WebRTC, that thing is an overengineered mess. It works, but I don’t like the complexity it brings.

[1]: https://payload.app/

Personally (as I mentioned elsewhere) I still use Tinc for my devices because I prefer "set the thing up once and never much think about it again;"

The loss of a "central server" or whatever never matters.

Cloud bandwidth is still crazy expensive if you use big cloud, and a lot of people think that’s all there is.

There are a lot of things that do P2P under the hood, usually with cloud relay fallback so it always works. You just don’t hear much about it because it’s not a selling point, just an under the hood detail.

Nintendo Switch multiplayer

*shudders*

Firs time I'm hearing about tinc, looks great. How does it compare to wireguard? Pros and cons?

Can you elaborate on what you mean by "no discussion in the western hemisphere"? Zerotier is fairly well known in the US.

You need a government license to operate a website in China, and that's their license number.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ICP_license

Like other products in this category, this is for private networks, internal to your company or self. I don't think it's an intended use case to connect to computers not in your control.

It's useful when you have computers that talk to each other over the internet, likely without public interfaces, and using protocols that may or may not be secure.

This is exactly that by thought was. This solves nothing what the traditional VPN or TOR is used for. It's like running an exit node from your hope IP address. You do not want to do that.

can't quite figure out exactly the ins and outs but it seems to masquerade as wireguard. which would make VPNs redundant as it would itself be a VPN.

this would mean, for instance, torrents that are wireguarded between peers by default. sure you will see tons of IPs connected via wireguard but who is going to bother intercepting them?

this is more like zerotier/tailscale - sorta a virtual LAN

it’s like someone saw Tor and said "but what if we removed all the safeguards?"

This is a Chinese project (hosted inside China), so probably not very well.

From personal experience, the great firewall picks up on wireguard usage when tunneling to my home computer (not in China) and throttles the connection. I am guessing that this would have similar limitations when using wireguard.

Yes. There is also ZeroTier, but it is proprietary (as is Hamachi)

To the web page source. But the software itself is under https://github.com/EasyTier/EasyTier