diff --git a/x4.md b/x4.md index ea6ee7d..b18a436 100644 --- a/x4.md +++ b/x4.md @@ -33,23 +33,3 @@ The Status Protocol uses [Whisper in version 6](https://github.com/ethereum/wiki Note: there is one more cross-layer dependency in the Status Protocol between the privacy and data layers. Whisper uses topics to reduce traffic and preliminarily filter out messages. However, selecting a topic depends on the type of the message that is a topic for 1-1 chat will be different from a topic for a public chat. Please refer to [Initial Transport Privacy through Whisper Specification](x7.md) for more details. - -# P2P layer - -P2P layer allows various clients to securely communicate with each other through the internet in a decentralized fashion, eventually forming a peer-to-peer network. Due to our close relationship to Ethereum and the fact that Whisper is built on top of [devp2p](https://github.com/ethereum/devp2p), we use [devp2p](https://github.com/ethereum/devp2p) as a P2P layer. - -A client in order to rely a message needs to first find other clients (this process is called node discovery and is out of scope of this specification) within the peer-to-peer network. Then, the message needs to be properly routed handling obstacles like NAT traversal. All these things are handled by devp2p. - - - -# Dependencies between layers - -As it was mentioned above, there are cases when two layers depend on one another: -* encrypting messages is done by the privacy layer instead of security layer -* the privacy layer needs to know some details of the payload to properly route it. - -In the next version of the protocol, we will try to remove these dependencies so that all layers are orthogonal and if necessary there is a clean interface between one and another.