i've decided that the current level of abstraction in the anonymous network demands user-defined message lengths (there is a lower level that achieves the anonymity guarantees which does actual pouzin datagrams i.e. fixed-size) but i now have to determine how chunks of a message are linked across the given route (it uses source routing)
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torrents offer an interesting model but i'm still not entirely sure how to navigate this. i would like to say no SIR you must send standard-size datagrams but the establishment of a route (onion routed but Worse) is heavy enough that i would prefer not to do this.
i believe what i would like to do here actually is not terribly difficult it's to associate a tag (non-sequential—the network does not know how to arrange your slices together) to a datagram and then to use the tag to distinguish fragments of a message. it's very important that it not be sequential (ideally random) so that the network is not able to force a replay attack (in fact the protocol involves a mechanism to determine which component of the network is failing to propagate datagrams so that it can be routed around—the way everyone pretends the internet works)
that's slightly more complex than the beautiful architecture i had before but it is not unreasonable at all (in fact it's correct) to assume the network failing to propagate an item is an exceptional event and it can't really lie and just tell you it didn't get it because of the state machine at each hop
totally just realized this is exactly the right thing to do because the bidirectional notifications can be more efficiently merged if they belong to the same variable-size message
funny name https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bufferbloat it is intended to explain the nondeterminism in the internet so it needs to be a meme to distract from the poor design of the internet
POUZIN WOULD NEVER https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Packet_loss
To avoid all of these problems, the Internet Protocol allows for routers to simply drop packets if the router or a network segment is too busy to deliver the data in a timely fashion.
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