@KPrasch and I made a quick (but good) decision to finally pull the DHT. The choice was between either spending another day on workarounds for DHT wonkiness or pull it completely.

Since the DHT had already been so thoroughly deprecated as to relegate it only to facilitating propagation of TreasureMaps between Ursulas (a task which can be accomplished by other more robust means within a similar timeframe), we pulled it.

Be reminded that, until now, we have largely discussed a practice for Testnet wherein Alice simply hands the TreasureMap directly to Bob (upon granting).

The DHT version of this scenario was fraught with real-world security concerns that were wont to raise their head even on testnet:

• It was possible for someone to upload a 10GB "TreasureMap", causing widespread frustration or even DoS.

• No particular authorization was required to place a TreasureMap on the DHT. There was no reason to believe that it wasn't simply an arbitrary piece of data, and no reason to believe that each Policy was followed by exactly one TreasureMap.

@tuxxy raises concerns here about exactly what we'll do now that we've pulled this piece of machinery.

I assert that it will be fairly straightforward to write a custom protocol for this in Twisted. We might also consider implementing something standardized like Whisper.

And although this is a medium-sized undertaking, I don't think it was worth sinking more time into accommodating the DHT, nor is it even worth stressing about pre-testnet.