Pablo is not right and I disagree with point 2 as well.

Having a fixed set of trusted relays is good for network performance and trust if your client isn’t hardened. You can just remove a bad relay if it’s malicious. In the gossip model you can’t and others can force your client to pull from any relay they desire.

Im not that worried about the network overhead if the gossip model, connections are pretty cheap, just a bit of state in the kernel. Maybe you would need some kind of LRU connection pool? I have yet to think about how to optimize this, but it’s not impossible.

@3bf0c63f continues to downplay the engineering challenges for the gossip model. Its easy to criticize us larger clients for not caring about decentralization, but its already very hard to make a performant client on mobile, and now we have to make sure our app still works in the presence of way more connections and potentially faulty and slow micro relays.

I’ve spent almost a year building an in-client relay just so this model doesn’t affect the performance and security of the app. I’m almost at the point where I can begin experimenting with this model only because of it. it’s a damn hard thing to switch to without a large amount of engineering, but we are getting there.