My work for BigRed//Hacks 2017.
The graph should maintain 2-regularity (in the spirit of "tiny"). Each node should store a list of other active nodes. If it loses connection with one of its neighbors, it should attempt to connect with another neighbor. Two-regularity is enough to propogate all information through the networkf. Evidently, this information should include IPs of active nodes, blocks (obviously), and, perhaps, pending transactions. I still have to devise a system for collecting pending transactions, a system for chunking the collected pending teransactions into blocks, and a system for verifying the pending blocks to add them to the chain.
- Each node can generate information by sending it to each of its ~2 neighbors, and each node can propogate received information by sending it to its ~1 ignorant neighbor (if the neighbor is not ignorant, then it has already propogated the information)
- Best to develop a protocol robust to the general graph, not the tinychain network
A node shouldn't announce its presence in the peer-to-peer network until it is successfully listening for transactions. Right now, a node announces its presence immediately after discovering the peer-to-peer network.
I want a distributed database that sets a reasonable set of rules for adding to the database.
If I had access to my remote server, I would be serving IPs (and ports) instead of just ports. Because I am doing everything locally, IP is irrelevant.
I couldn't use socket bidirectionally because the client read while loop ran infinitely (this is what I think - eliminating the loop fixed the hang issue).
I made a list of active nodes to show how discovery might work (if I had had access to a remote machine). I spent a lot of time trying to download this list in standard C, to no avail. I read about http requests, and then looked at implementations here and here.
I also used this post, this post while trying to figure out how to send an http get request. This post helped me with the basics of sockets, and this tutorial was very useful, while this question and this question helped me identify problems (I think?).