Nicknames

Your P2P node has an address that lists information on your network interface cards and meta data useful for encrypted communication. The address is very long. Similar, to an IP addresses, so that working with them directly can be cumbersome. You can imagine having to read many numbers to a friend and hoping they enter them correct.

Hint

See How P2PD works for a more in-depth look at the address format in P2PD.

Fortunately, P2PD has a simple solution: nicknames. Nicknames give you the ability to give your node a short memorable name. The name can then be easily shared and used to lookup your nodes address information. What’s cool about this system is it requires no registration to use. Instead, there’s a fixed limit of names that can be registered per IP address and the limit acts as a queue.

Above you can see the process of registering a name. It involves creating ECDSA keys for signing operations that create / update names; Making HTTP requests to name servers; and seeing if your request succeeded. Actually, names in P2PD have a second part appended – a TLD – that identifies the sub-set of name servers that store the name on. The TLD is calculated based on the responses received when registering a name (success or not.) Though the software automates this part for you.

from p2pd import *

async def example():
    node = await P2PNode()
    peer_name = await node.nickname("unique") # -> unique.tld 
    print(peer_name)
    print(node.addr_bytes) # Long address stored at unique.tld.

Another peer can then use your node’s nickname in a connect call. Note: that whatever name you pass to nickname isn’t the full name that you need to share. The function returns the full name which has a TLD appended to it. E.g. “name.peer”