Reticulum is an elegant engineers approach to networking. It’s a complete replacement of the network stack, it’s entirely encrypted, and can communicate and can correctly organize global-scale mesh-networks over any connection >5b/s without the need for distributed hash tables, or any resource usage besides bandwidth. This makes it far lighter than GNUnet, and friendly to low-power, low bandwidth, embedded networks and devices.
This makes it viable as a global network, as it is super cheap to interact with. And it can run on any device, including your smartphone natively.
Bandwidth is a physical resource of the natural world. Reticulum is based on the principle of creating systems that (as far as is possible for a computer program) understand the physical limits of real-world resources, and manages them responsibly and intelligently, with well-thought out algorithms.
When that is ultimately not possible any more, human beings have to step in and expand capacity or make other thoughtful decisions on how to manage the available resources. I believe this is the most efficient, holistic and human-friendly approach to creating technologies that actually help us and better our lives.
This is a very cool concept and it seems quite mature for something in beta. I do however have my doubts over choosing to use python for something as often used as the network stack. As I understand it, one of the goals for this project is efficiency, and while python is very efficient to write, it is notably very inefficient during runtime.
I think that's actually a very positive sign. This is a mesh network made by radio people, not a mesh made by networking nerds. Now that it's mature, they are doing a rewrite in C++.
Hit me up on some of the nomad network bulletin boards.
That's awesome, someone actually using Python what it's best for, creating a minimum viable product, before moving onto something more permanent!
I'll be very interested to see where this project ends up going.