[jamesblonde]

Interestingly, the original Kademlia paper did not make it into any of the big p2p conferences at the time. It was published at some 2nd tier p2p workshop. It was only when the system gained actual adoption, that people referenced the paper.

In contrast, Chord, which was published 1 year earlier in 2001 is one of the most cited papers in computer science. However, Chord was not practical. It assumed the availability of bi-directional connections between any two hosts. However, NATs had just started to appear, which broke Chord. Kademlia, which does not require peers to maintain a well-defined routing structure (the ring in Chord) can muddle through with NATs - because the routing table is a huge messy tree and if any branches lead you to the destination, it will kind of work.

[hvidgaard]

Being the engine behind trackerless BitTorrent gave it quite some exposure too. I do not know if it was before or after it became known in academia.

[jamesblonde]

My point was that it became the engine behind trackerless BT because it worked in the presence of NATs - even if other architectures, like Chord, had superior properties (if you assume an unrealistic model of the open internet).

The other point of note is that Kademlia was not designed to work in the presence of NATs. That was a feature whose value was only appreciated when ISPs ran out of open IP addresses and NAT'd up whole networks. It shows the value of exploratory, basic research.