https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49454785

> Even more ironic is that NAT got normalized as a security feature — “your devices are hidden!” — which is one of the things that made people resist the thing that would fix it.

That tracks. I briefly looked into the Tailscale website and I thought maybe I was wrong, maybe it's not a NAT/ddns toolchain, maybe it's something more complex that I'm too dumb to understand. But if my thesis that it's NATware is right, it makes sense to market it as a security product, it fooled me for one, but it also passes as a quality product for an organization, and they feel they are getting a security product when they are actually signing the purchase request of a developer that is applying networking techniques they learned from managing a videogame server.

The problem is being directly routable is just Step 1 of N for getting 2 services to communicate. Next you need a name service like DNS but preferably free like email if you expect every home to have one. No, your ISP shouldn’t provide it because you don’t use their email do you? Don’t be any more locked in to your ISP than you have to.

Once you get a name service so humans can actually connect to one another as easily as sending an email you need authentication, identity, authorization, and encryption.

No problem just use a shared password and Let’s Encrypt right?

Well now you have a huge security risk (a single factor password auth) and a new centralized SPoF: Let’s Encrypt.

IPv6 alone solves none of this and only makes the need for a name service more pronounced as the address is much longer.

Sure all of this is solvable but if it were easily solvable wouldn’t more people do doing it on IPv6 already? I’ve had native IPv6 through Comcast/Xfinity for over a decade.

Designing p2p services is just entirely distinct from the routability problem NAT presents, and after decades of widespread internet access I’ve only seen p2p use decrease after the heyday of file sharing apps (of which all the most popular ones have degrees of centralization). Making usable p2p apps seems as hard as usable p2p encryption schemes like PGP/GPG: the usability vs security tradeoffs are brutally hard.