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by mschuster91 2125 days ago
> Can't wait for humanity to become a multi-planet species, as then application developers would have to start taking multi-minute latencies into account, and hopefully that'll help me as someone with ~500ms latency to most services.

Stuff that requires realtime (or near realtime) communication simply won't be possible.

What remains is bulk data transfer, here I guess the only viable way is:

1) on both ends in both directions, massive buffers (at least bandwidth x 4)

2) massive FEC (of course it will reduce the net bandwidth, but there's no real other way to avoid lots of retransmissions)

3) sender station transmits the data in blocks, with each object of data having a specified number of blocks

3) receiver station checks all the data blocks for integrity, places it in buffers, and transmits back a list of broken blocks and a list of successfully received blocks

4) sender station receives the list of broken/successful blocks, deletes successful blocks from its buffer and retransmits those marked as broken

5) receiver station waits until all the blocks for an object of data have been successfully transmitted, and delivers the message to the recipient system

2 comments

Yeah, in short: content-addressable systems are needed if we're ever to send data between planets on a larger scale. Systems like IPFS and alike solves this problem nicely, at least in my tests with high-latency scenarios.