protocol_spec/faq.md

I Have Internet Access. Why Should I Care?

• Everything [in the cloud] is Amazing, But Nothing is Ours
• Encryption is Not Preventing Law Enforcement from Investigating Crime
• ‘Nobody’s got to use the Internet’: A GOP lawmaker’s response to concerns about Web privacy
• How Iran Turned Off the Internet
• Google goes offline after fibre cables cut
• Building Internet-connected things seems obvious today, but what about when there’s no Internet?
• The death of America's net neutrality and how it affects you
• YouTube and Facebook Are Removing Evidence of Atrocities, Jeopardizing Cases Against War Criminals
• Iraq introduces nightly internet curfew
• Building a Low-Tech Internet
• Inside Cuba's massive, weekly, human-curated sneakernet
• CollapseOS
• Indian Internet shut down as protests rage against citizenship bill
• Authoritarian Nations Are Turning the Internet Into a Weapon
• Russian Law Takes Effect that Gives Government Sweeping Power Over Internet

When is Pigeon the Wrong Choice?

• When the application requires true deletion of data, ephemeral data or mutability of previously created data. Pigeon feeds are immutable, append-only and permanently replicated by peers.
• When the application requires realtime interactions or does not benefit from delay tolerance. Support for TCP or UDP sockets will never be added.
• Extremely "chatty" protocols. Pigeon was built with the assumption that data storage is cheap and data transfer is expensive and slow. Use cases with complex handshakes, pinging or timeouts may not be well suited to this protocol.

Is This a Blockchain?

It's different than a block chain despite some similarity. A global blockchain is a singleton, and Pigeon has no singletons. Each Pigeon node maintains their own feed of messages rather than sharing a global feed. When you trust a peer, you agree to replicate their feed. You also replicate the feed of their peers. Unlike a blockchain, there are many feeds (rather than one) and they do not require consensus or coordination to coexist. Additionally, forking of feeds is not supported by Pigeon.

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