I think I must have heard about UDP hole punching since the last 5 dev update if not more.
What I understand is this allow people not needing to forward a port on their router to access safe network, a network that doesn’t exit yet.
Isn’t it a better strategy to have a working Safe network core working with the remainder 100 000 000 people who are smart enough to do port forwarding or follow simple instructions. How To Set Up Port Forwarding - Port Forward UPNP ?
Well, that wouldn’t be Secure Access For Everyone.
One of my initial takeaways to discovering the SAFE Network is the thought that I could log on to a public computer (think library) and start a session on the SAFE Network. The libraries don’t have a static way to do this, nor, I think, would they be motivated to.
UDP hole punching opens up many possibilities as well as the ability for widespread ease of adoption. It is certainly a aspect that must be implemented before I start telling all my friends to try out the Network.
Not every router allows this, think of the routers supplied by their ISP that is locked down. Doesn’t matter if you are smart enough for configuring port forwarding or not.
Also on launch we want anybody to be able to use SAFE without waiting for version 1.2 or 2.2 or whenever you feel its time to add this feature.
I am more interested in how they are going to do it.
To access the network as a client, hole punching is not required. For all nodes participating in the network though, it is crucial that they can be reached. So with or without hole-punching, any node considered part of the network needs to be accessible (as it’s providing a service)