[paulasmuth]

Yes, this seems like a bunch of work to keep up and running and I agree that most of the meat of their solution is actually in Google's or Amazon's systems running the GeoDNS/push stuff. Hopefully IPv6 will fix it all ™.

However, until then, GCM [1] seems like a really good workaround. And I believe it is actually free of charge and available for both iOS and Android.

[1] https://developers.google.com/cloud-messaging/

[zaroth]

Just centralize it :-). Exactly the reason I think IPv6 won't fix it (arbitrary inbound will still be firewalled by upstream either as a ToS/AUP or as a "feature") because too much money is at stake for the centralized services.

I think solid decentralized service discovery and direct routing would be as pivotal as the Blockchain itself. One actually helps solve the other, e.g using an altcoin for anti-spam. But the direct routing (a better NAT hole punch) apparently is not possible without service provider cooperation.

Tor is probably the biggest reliable semi-centralized overlay network, I'm not sure if there are any better options for punching through NAT that don't involve running your own public relay or trusting a 3rd party. But I assume Tor is much too slow to support realtime voice between an arbitrary client and hidden service?

Bitcoin miners faced a similar problem of needing to build a higher speed relay network to shuttle large blocks faster than the existing P2P relay network. In that case there was a group of P2P nodes configured to allow much larger number of peers combined with dedicated fast paths between themselves each located in high-speed hubs. I'm not sure if it was ever deployed.

[simoncion]

Comcast Residential only filters 25, 135, 139, 445 and -for some reason- 1080.

If Comcast isn't applying an aggressive inbound firewall, pretty much noone will.

[pigeons]

http://bitcoinrelaynetwork.org/