I've been following Iroh's development for quite some time now and I have to say that I've been really impressed with what you've built so far.

At one point I'm going to use Iroh (or something heavily inspired by it) as the transport layer for a project I am working on. Can't wait.

I do have one question though while I have your attention: what was the reason you decided to use the Ed25519 public key as the NodeId directly? I mean, why not derive the NodeId from the public key instead (by hashing it for example)? Then the protocol itself would not be so tightly bound to Ed25519. A little indirection here would have been useful imho.

It's the one thing I have been wondering about Irohs design that I haven't really been able to answer by myself.

Anyways, great work! Keep it up!

We decided to keep things simple. In general we try to provide one good way to do something instead of having a lot of options.

E.g. we only provide Ed25519 for keys and in iroh-blobs only BLAKE3 for hashing, instead of having a multihash scheme. Having the public key directly available is sometimes useful, e.g. for verifying signatures. It also allowed us to directly use the mainline extension BEP_0044 to store data for public keys.

That being said, I am very confident that we will be able to provide a relatively smooth transition if we ever have to switch from Ed25519 to another public key format.

For connection encryption we use a TLS extension called raw public keys in TLS, and here of course the keys are prefixed, and we could easily upgrade to another key format and then at some point stop supporting Ed25519 keys.

raw public keys in TLS: https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc7250 storing arbitrary data in the DHT: https://www.bittorrent.org/beps/bep_0044.html

The first paragraph of the article mentions it's an all-stock deal. No checks where written for this.

As someone who has used Hetzner in one form or another for close to two decades, I frankly find this behaviour shocking.

Besides the normal support channels, try reaching out on their subreddit and also post in the customer forum - to make this more public.

If they don't want your business, fine. But giving you only a couple of weeks to move 12 PB is unreasonable.