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fix(blog): remove retired QUIC 0-RTT claim from why-now #242

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alpergundogdu merged 2 commits into from
Sep 18, 2026
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fix(blog): remove retired QUIC 0-RTT claim from why-now #242

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fix(blog): remove retired QUIC 0-RTT claim from why-now
alpergundogdu Sep 18, 2026
f857339
fix(blog): grammar in why-now transport bullet
alpergundogdu Sep 18, 2026
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2 changes: 1 addition & 1 deletion content/blog/01-why-now.mdx
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Expand Up @@ -15,7 +15,7 @@ Decentralized CDNs have been attempted for a decade. Most got stuck before they

QUIC was an IETF draft until 2021. By 2024 it carried roughly a third of public web traffic and shipped natively in every major OS. The properties that matter for a delivery network are now load-bearing parts of the public internet, not a thing we have to build.

- **0-RTT connection establishment.** A repeat connection sends application data in the first packet, no handshake round-trip. For a CDN where probe fan-out is the critical-path latency — a cache-miss probes ~30 peers in parallel — this collapses inter-continental discovery from ~250–500ms down to one-way RTT. We use 0-RTT on `cdn/probe/v1` and `cdn/dht/v1`. Five years ago we'd have had to build it on top of TCP+TLS ourselves and accept 2× the discovery latency.
- **Concurrent probing, then connection reuse.** For a CDN, the critical-path latency is probe fan-out, not the handshake: a cache-miss probes ~30 peers in parallel over `cdn/probe/v1` and `cdn/dht/v1`, taking the fastest good answers within a bounded ~500ms collection window and exiting early once enough replies arrive. Every connection still completes a full TLS 1.3 handshake — decdn does not use 0-RTT — but connection reuse and QUIC stream multiplexing carry repeat requests over an already-open connection instead of paying a fresh handshake each time. Five years ago we'd have had to build all of this on TCP+TLS ourselves.
- **NAT traversal as a library function.** iroh ships hole-punching, relay fallback, and direct-path upgrade as a single `Endpoint` API. The fraction of node operators behind residential NAT we can usefully include just went from ~10% to ~95% without us writing networking code.
- **Connection migration.** A node operator's IP changing mid-stream — laptop sleep, mobile handoff, ISP renegotiation — doesn't kill the delivery session. This is the difference between "you need a static IP and a real datacenter" and "your spare 1U at home counts."

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