This might sound pointed, but it truly isn't - why is this approach not already commonplace? As a concept, looking up a verifiable identity makes sense, but often ideas that made sense were looked into and discarded for valid reasons. Would be good to understand those to better understand when/when not to use the project?
Previous similar attempts were often not pragmatic or frugal enough. They cared about peer to peer purity more than about it working under all circumstances. They also frequently overabstracted things.
So we got into the sad situation that people associate peer to peer connectivity systems with having to frequently debug the entire stack and having recurrent performance or connectivity issues.
A part of the motivation for the iroh team is to change this notion by being very pragmatic and minimalistic. E.g. the use of relays vs. enlisting other peers to help with hole punching.
You're right, it does make sense. This is how the internet was designed but not how it was implemented.
Originally, every machine was a directly reachable peer, but a finite supply of addresses (IPv4) forced most devices behind translation boxes (NAT) that let them dial out without ever being dialable. Once traffic had to route through the few hosts that stayed reachable, those hosts became toll booths, which is partially where the more centralized internet we actually got came from.
