mirror of https://github.com/waku-org/waku.org.git
84 lines
2.3 KiB
Markdown
84 lines
2.3 KiB
Markdown
---
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title: About
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category: page
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---
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# About
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Communication today is rife with third party interference.
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From censorship and deplatforming, to rent seeking intermediaries, to the misuse of data in the surveillance economy.
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Waku is designed to place control of communication back into the hands of the individual.
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## Motivation and goals
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### Privacy
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These applications have a desire for some privacy guarantees, such as pseudonymity, metadata protection in transit, etc.
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### Peer-to-Peer
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These applications sometimes have requirements that make them suitable for peer-to-peer solutions.
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### Generalized messaging
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Many applications require some form of messaging protocol to communicate between different subsystems or different nodes.
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This messaging can be human-to-human or machine-to-machine or a mix.
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### Resource restricted
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These applications often run in constrained environments,
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where resources or the environment is restricted in some fashion.
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E.g.:
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- limited bandwidth, CPU, memory, disk, battery, etc.,
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- not being publicly connectable,
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- only being intermittently connected; mostly-offline.
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## History
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Waku v1 was a fork of Whisper with some added tweaks for efficiency.
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Waku v2 is a completely redesigned suite of protocols designed to address the goals set out above.
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```mermaid
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%%{init: { 'logLevel': 'debug', 'theme': 'base', 'gitGraph': {'showBranches': true, 'showCommitLabel':true,'mainBranchName': 'HISTORY'}} }%%
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gitGraph
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commit id:"2013"
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commit id:"2015" tag:"R&D"
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commit id:"2018" tag:"R&D" type: HIGHLIGHT
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branch v1
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checkout v1
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commit id:"2020" tag:"release"
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checkout HISTORY
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merge v1
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branch v2
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checkout v2
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commit id:"2021" tag:"release"
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checkout HISTORY
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merge v2
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commit id:"🔥"
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```
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### 2013
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Ethereum White Paper was introduced with the Holy Trinity,
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consisting of Ethereum for consensus, Swarm for decentralized storage, and Whisper for p2p messaging.
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### 2015-2018
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R&D of Whisper was slow to follow progress of the Ethereum EVM and Swarm without a dedicated team building out the protocol.
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### 2018
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With little progress made on Whisper and significant scalability concerns growing,
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Vac was formed to conduct R&D on more scalable p2p messaging.
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### 2020
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Waku v1 was introduced as the messaging protocol in Status, replacing Whisper.
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### 2021
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Waku v2 replaces Waku v1.
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