[s986s]

Ok, so the simple example you gave is very abstract. Alice and bob may have a great time talking on the phone but I felt no closer to understanding its purpose.

I do understand the purpose in requesting a resource from Alice that has no ip address associated to it. Say Bob and Alice are part of a network. Alice saves s file on one of the computers but has no idea which one. Bob wants that file. Hash Identifier protocol provides a standardized way to retrieve it. Using it, Bob makes a request to sll conputers and only one responds.

The RFC felt far more boring than this topic is. Technologies such as magnet uris and IPFS are your competition. I would argue that security is not the purpose for this though it can be used in conjuction. I believe this is far more effective for distributed systems