kademlia

I, already, reviewed a number of documents on this topic but there is something not exactly clear. For example bit torrent document ( http://www.bittorrent.org/beps/bep_0005.html ) states The routing table is subdivided into "buckets" that each cover a portion of the space. An empty table has one bucket with an ID space range of min=0, max=2^160. When a node with ID "N" is inserted into the table, it is placed within the bucket that has min <= N < max. An empty table has only one bucket so any node must fit within it. Each bucket can only hold K nodes, currently eight, before becoming "full."

The kademlia paper talks about the the organization of buckets, splitting, merging and finding the correct bucket to insert in abstract, concise and confusing terms. §2.2 talks about a fixed set of 160 buckets with each bucket covering a fixed subset of the keyspace. But later chapters involve additional splitting and buckets covering different parts of the keyspace. That don't fit well into a fixed list What is the correct way to organize buckets? Meta: Since the confusion is reflected in many questions and partial information has been scattered over many answers this Q&A are intended to

I'm now learning Kademlia network by reading the classical paper Kademlia: A Peer-to-peer Information System Based on the XOR Metric . I want to understand the complexity of its operation but still cannot figure it out. In the 3 Sketch of proof section, the paper gives two definitions: Depth of a node (h) : 160 − i, where i is the smallest index of a non-empty bucket Node y’s bucket height in node x : the index of the bucket into which x would insert y minus the index of x’s least significant empty bucket . And three conclusions: With overwhelming probability the height of a any given node

I am struggling with the original paper trying to understand seemingly contradicting paragraphs. One example is where in 2.2 the authors declare that for bit space 160 there will be 160 k buckets, then later go on to say that in fact the buckets are a smaller number covering wider bit ranges and organized by prefix binary trees. In that 2.4 section they talk about unbalanced trees that lead to interpretations like the following, https://stackoverflow.com/a/32187456/442396 , where it is not clear if the answer there does reflect MMs intentions. Is there a clearly documented consensus out there