Importance: 10%
The Big Idea
- Major network scaling forces Preferential attachment: more connections means more network effect means more connections, leading to the emergence of densely-connected hub nodes.
- N^2 scaling: if every fed has to talk to every other fed to exchange messages, the number of connections will scale exponentially with each additional node (n * (n -1)). This leads to the emergence of hubs that can aggregate and relay world state.
- Fitness pressure: Small nodes get taken down by large spikes in traffic, while large nodes stick around. Small nodes have fewer resources, large nodes have lots. Unreliable nodes attract fewer connections, while reliable nodes attract connections just by virtue of staying alive.
- Efficiency: exponentially-distributed networks are ultra-small worlds. You can get from anywhere to anywhere in just a few hops through hubs.
- Resilience: exponential networks survive random failures, because the chances are exponential that the node that fails will be from the long tail.
Article that lays this out: Nature’s Attempts at Evolving a Nostr