Reality Programming Association

Chapter 121: Chapter 50: A Rabbit Ghost Wandering in JCU

The silence on the other end of the phone didn’t last long.

”I think Old Yu is right,” Shi Zuozhou broke the silence with a reckless determination. ”This thing is like Da Yu taming the floods—you can’t just block it. Even if we don’t do this, those thrill-seeking students will still go looking for resources on other forums and cloud drives. Since we can’t suppress the spread, we might as well control the ’entrance’ ourselves.”

Shao Yiyi, the Evil Bun Head, had been in favor of it from the start. ”Fight fire with fire! Brother Cos, I love your plan! With the resources in our hands, we won’t have to panic!”

Wen Xiao’s voice also came through the line. Though she was a little hesitant, her tone was mostly resolute. ”Yeah, if we really need to distribute an ’antidote’ in the future, this is the only viable path.”

Seeing that everyone agreed with the plan, Yu Xian concluded, ”Since we’ve reached a consensus, let’s address the specific execution problems.”

Once they were on the same page, the rest was just a matter of technical and tactical deconstruction.

”I have two questions. Let’s discuss them one by one.” Yu Xian tossed out his first query. ”First, there’s the issue of transmission bandwidth that Wen Xiao mentioned to me yesterday. Didn’t you say yesterday that we could only send text messages? If we send audio files of several dozen megabytes over it, will the bandwidth and transmission speed hold up?”

He then added, ”Furthermore, in the early stages, there will be too few nodes. Without users, there’s no network, and without a network, there are no users. Isn’t this a cold start paradox?”

”Hmm... That is indeed a major issue,” Wen Xiao sounded like she was deep in thought. ”But it’s not unsolvable.”

She explained, ”For the problem of having too few nodes, we won’t aim for pure ’decentralization’ in the initial phase. We can borrow a few high-performance computers from the main building computer labs on campus and add them to the network as ’supernodes.’”

”Supernodes?”

”Right. These supernodes will act like signal towers. We’ll cache popular resources on them to provide high-speed downloads. Later, once the user base grows and everyone’s phone becomes a mini storage warehouse, we can gradually remove these supernodes and return the network to true decentralization.”

”Sounds good! We’ll concentrate our resources to get the big things done first!” Shi Zuozhou enthusiastically agreed.

”What about the bandwidth issue?” Yu Xian asked.

”I’ve anticipated this. We can slice those large audio files into countless tiny fragments and store them across different phones—distributed storage,” Wen Xiao explained confidently. ”When you download a file, you aren’t downloading it from just one person. Instead, you’re ’piecing’ it together from dozens of nearby people who hold the fragments.”

Shi Zuozhou’s voice was now filled with admiration. ”Damn, that’s equivalent to everyone ’feeding’ each other, keeping the system running on its own! Isn’t that the same logic as the old BitTorrent downloads for movies?”

Shao Yiyi followed this line of thought. ”We can also set up a ’reward mechanism.’ Whoever contributes more storage space and bandwidth will get higher priority for downloading and forwarding, along with more Rabbit Hole points!”

”Great, let’s call the Rabbit Hole points ’Carrots’!” Shi Zuozhou and Shao Yiyi were on the exact same wavelength.

Yu Xian nodded. Now that the technical difficulties had a solution, he raised his second concern. ”What about security? I mean, the security of the four of us.”

He paused before continuing, ”If we really become the biggest resource site, it means we’ll be thrust into the spotlight. Whether it’s the school administration or the mysterious organization behind that TDI, they might set their sights on us. If we’re exposed, the consequences would be unimaginable.”

This was his greatest worry: if Rabbit Hole became too flashy, would they end up playing with fire and getting burned?

”There’s no need to worry about that,” Wen Xiao explained. ”Our biggest advantage is decentralization. That word means that in our architecture, there are no ’administrators’ and no ’backend.’ All users, including ourselves, are just a string of randomly generated public key codes within the network.”

”You mean we won’t need a phone number or an email to log in? We won’t even have a conventional account system?” Shi Zuozhou was quite shocked; he had never seen an architecture like this before.

”Exactly. Your public key is your account, and your private key is your password. Code is the law; the code itself is the rule.” Wen Xiao’s tone revealed her admiration as a technician for this type of architecture.

”So, it’s like we have equal rights with other users? We’re just ordinary nodes, and no one will know who the operators are?” Shao Yiyi asked.

”Yes. Even if they intercept the data packets, they’ll only see a bunch of gibberish bouncing between phones. They won’t know who sent which file.”

Wen Xiao used an analogy. ”It’s like a drop of water hiding in the ocean. We are just four ordinary drops in the sea. Furthermore, as long as Rabbit Hole is still running on a node somewhere, the network cannot be killed.”

Yu Xian sat up straight, a question coming to mind. ”If that’s the case, how do we guarantee our say in this node network? I know it sounds like we want to have our cake and eat it too, but don’t forget, that was our goal and starting point to begin with.”

”You’re right. I don’t want it to turn into a cyber wasteland filled with spam or even malicious traps either.” On the other end of the phone, it seemed Wen Xiao had already considered this.