[lotharrr]

(author here)

The protocol enumerates all the IPv4 addresses on each side, and attempts to connect to all of them, and the first successful handshake wins.

So if your VPN arrangement enables a direct connection, `wormhole send` will use that, which will be faster than going through the relay (and cheaper for the relay operator).

A basic VPN gets you safe connectivity between the two sides, but transferring a file still requires something extra, like a preconfigured ssh/scp account, or a webserver and the recipient running `curl`/`wget`. magic-wormhole is intended make that last part easy, at least for one-off transfers, just `wormhole send FILENAME` on one side, and `wormhole receive [CODE]` on the other.

[TheRealPomax]

Right, I'm more commenting on the "have my friend slurp files" part: that sounds more like they want to set up a VPN with normal file sharing (e.g. full network shares) so their friend can just grab literally anything as long as it's in a network share. It didn't sound like they needed individual file transfers.