Skip to main content

2 posts tagged with "Reticulum"

View all tags

Four internets: Reticulum, I2P, Yggdrasil and Nostr side by side

· 15 min read
UR3PKI
UR3PKI
Software Engineer

Reticulum, I2P, Yggdrasil and Nostr keep getting lined up together — and wrongly so. They are not competitors: they fix different floors of the same building. One replaces radio and routing, the second hides who talks to whom, the third hands out addresses, the fourth takes your account away from the platforms.

500 bytesReticulum's MTU. It lives on a 300 bit/s channel — where TCP/IP will not even start
3 + 3Other people's nodes between a client and a site in I2P: its outbound tunnel plus the site's inbound tunnel
0200::/7The Yggdrasil range. An IPv6 address here is a public key fingerprint
0How much Nostr relays know about each other. The client spreads the copies itself

Reticulum up close: a network stack where the address is a key

· 22 min read
UR3PKI
UR3PKI
Software Engineer

Reticulum is not a messenger, not a VPN and not a "network for shady business". It is a complete network stack in which the address is a key fingerprint, encryption has no off switch, and the carrier can be a LoRa radio, a piece of wire or ordinary TCP. This note takes it apart layer by layer: from the bits in the packet header to the board on the desk. The radio physics underneath is in the LoRa deep dive.

500 bytesThe MTU — the packet size ceiling. Chosen to fit into a LoRa frame
16 bytesThe whole address: 128 bits of truncated SHA-256 — and no registry
19 bytesThe whole header of an ordinary packet, address included
128The maximum number of hops a packet can travel through transport nodes