DHT node count is displayed prominently in the bottom status bar of my bittorrent client
Yeah, that doesn’t contradict what i said - bittorrent has a DHT, and it is optional. (Many clients do use it, as well as the older non-distributed type of trackers, by default.)
Most distributed data stores employ some form of DHT for lookup.
I won’t argue about if “most” do but certainly many do not. In the case of a non-sharded blockchain like bitcoin, using a DHT for storage wouldn’t make sense. Some other blockchains probably do use DHTs for peer discovery or other things, but this is not an essential feature or “where blockchain comes from” at all. Most blockchains don’t use DHTs (and yet they could be called “distributed data stores”).
That page also links to https://en.bitcoinwiki.org/wiki/Distributed_hash_table - but the existence of a page about DHTs on a wiki with “bitcoin” in its name does not mean that bitcoin uses a DHT 😄 (there are many pages on that wiki about things that have little or nothing to do with bitcoin).
DHTs are extremely overhyped in the p2p space imo. They tend to be awful for privacy, easy to attack in various ways, and generally unreliable - especially in an adversarial setting. Which is why, many years after bittorrent introduced its DHT, most clients still use old-style trackers by default too.
Yeah, that doesn’t contradict what i said - bittorrent has a DHT, and it is optional. (Many clients do use it, as well as the older non-distributed type of trackers, by default.)
I won’t argue about if “most” do but certainly many do not. In the case of a non-sharded blockchain like bitcoin, using a DHT for storage wouldn’t make sense. Some other blockchains probably do use DHTs for peer discovery or other things, but this is not an essential feature or “where blockchain comes from” at all. Most blockchains don’t use DHTs (and yet they could be called “distributed data stores”).
That page also links to https://en.bitcoinwiki.org/wiki/Distributed_hash_table - but the existence of a page about DHTs on a wiki with “bitcoin” in its name does not mean that bitcoin uses a DHT 😄 (there are many pages on that wiki about things that have little or nothing to do with bitcoin).
DHTs are extremely overhyped in the p2p space imo. They tend to be awful for privacy, easy to attack in various ways, and generally unreliable - especially in an adversarial setting. Which is why, many years after bittorrent introduced its DHT, most clients still use old-style trackers by default too.