Why does iri use manual neighbor discovery?

Question

The process of pairing with neighbours on slack #nodesharing is tedious. Why doesn't iri use automatic discovery of neighbors like other p2p networks?

Answer 1

Visit "Discussion: Removing Peer Discovery" to read about it.

To quote briefly from the discussion:

[...] we've collected enough data to be able to determine that Peer Discovery is causing more problems than it does good.

[...]

The Problems

Snapshotting: Peer Discovery basically makes it possible for previousu transactions to be rebroadcast and picked up by the majority of the network. Thus coming back to pre-snapshot state.

Difficulty Adjustment: Difficulty is supposed to self-adjust according to the network topology (tps, etc.), with PD this difficulty adjustment does not work as intended.

Bandwidth: The bandwidth consumption increases exponentially, so if we want to have a system fit for running in IoT where every tiny bit of resource is scarce, we have such a waste.

Syncing: Currently syncing is fairly slow - without PD it should speed up.