Peer-to-peer

This page describes a concept which is part of our glossary

Peer-to-peer networks are known for their robustness and reliability. The way peers connect with other instances to form the network creates a peer-to-peer infrastructure. It enables users to connect directly with each other as desired to exchange products and services without having to employ middlemen as in the current centralised 'client-server' approach.

In general, peer-to-peer networks can be formed directly between people or organisations or can be formed from many different computers and devices communicating together through the same peer-to-peer networking software. At Organic Design we're developing the Platform specification which allows people and organisations to operate as part of a unified ontology which contains both the Platform network of people and organisations aligned with the specification, and also the Network of informational devices.

Transcending centralisation is a necessity

It's a commonly known meme nowadays that our survival as a species depends on us figuring out how to live and work together as a single organism. Another well known concept is the fractal nature of life that allows us to equate the biological cell with a person, and a single person with the planetary organism. In his book Spontaneous Evolution, Bruce Lipton shows us that we can learn from our cells how to live together in peace and harmony as a single organism since they're a living example of it, and have been doing it for millions of years.

Many people who are strong believers in this idea of humans living fully in accord with nature think that technology has no place in this vision. But by looking at how the cells in the human body are able to live together as a community with a population of over fifty trillion reveals that technology is essential. The cells manufacture and maintain huge infrastructures including the equivalent of buildings that are tens of thousands of stories high, sophisticated networking systems and even an energy based financial and banking system.

We know that somehow the Internet must be used to achieve this goal since it allows people all over the world to connect and share knowledge directly. But for us to use the Internet to organise into a community together, we need to change the way we use it. The currently dominant method of viewing and collaborating on the Internet, the World Wide Web, is not structured in a way that promotes the formation of people into a community from the bottom up, it doesn't match the way that cells organise themselves. The web is a centralised top-down structure, but it's the peer-to-peer networks that offer a foundation to work from which really mimics cellular organisation.

Articles

• How to fix what's gone wrong with the internet
• Excellent article on the state of collaborative society and related projects
• How Far Can the P2P Revolution Go? - will the sharing economy replace the State? by Jeffrey Tucker
• The Mission to Decentralise the Internet
• P2P-Based Economy: The Political Power Of Peer-To-Peer Networks
• The Future Now - an Interview with David de Ugarte
• Say Hola! to the newest route around web censorship
• Freenet philosophy

Videos

• Why P2P Is Better Than Capitalism
• The Economic Viability of Peer Production
• The Potential For P2P To Unite the World
• How Peer Governance and Democracy Differ
• Michel Bauwens' Vision for the World
• Why People Are Afraid of P2P
• How P2P Can Change Our Monetary System
• Peer To Peer and Alternative Currencies
• How P2P Can Continue To Grow
• The Relationship Between the People and the Technology
• Social, Political, And Economic Issues In A P2P World - Interview With Michel Bauwens

P2P protocols and file-systems

• DAT protocol - public-key-addressed file archives which can be synced securely and browsed on-demand
  • How DAT works
  • Hyperdrive + Hypercore
• IPFS: The Permanent Web - IPFS is a global, versioned, peer-to-peer filesystem
  • Akasha - IPFS + Ethereum
• WebRTC - browser-to-browser communications protocol initiated in 2011 and now in draft form at W3C
  • Nile.js WebRTC-based in-browser video-streamimg
  • WebTorrent - a browser-based torrent client based on WebRTC
  • Nebulis - new DNS content network built on IPFS and Ethereum
• Hashgraph consensus - a new way of doing decentralised consensus without a blockchain
• The TOR project
• I2P Anonymous Network
• The Freenet Project
• guifi.net
• P2P DNS
• Tonika - social routing with organic security
• TomP2P
• Scalaris
• OpenBTS
• PeerVote
• Byzantium Linux
• Osiris
• NightWeb - secure private social web for mobile devices using BitTorrent over I2P
• BitTorrent Sync - creates a p2p drop-box, no cloud required
• Tent - the protocol for decentralized communication
• DeadDrops.com - public file-sharing with USB sticks
• MaidSafe - could well be the holy grail of p2p!
• Bitcloud
• LibP2P - a modular network stack: run your network applications free from runtime and address services, independently of their location.

P2P markets

• Nostr - inspired by Scuttlebutt, but much simpler and more extensible (including organisation and markets)
• OpenBazaar - decentralised marketplace
• BitXBay - another decentralised marketplace
• Arcade City - a distributed version of Uber ride sharing
• Dark Wallet - Airbitz & Dark Wallet Devs Win Bitcoin Hackathon with DarkMarket!
• Bazar - software developed by Garum for inter-cooperative trading
• Open peer-to-peer markets - eBook by Jeremy Lichtman
• 0x project - an Ethereum-based decentralised exchange protocol
• REFLOW - a p2p economic network

P2P communications

• Matrix - federated open source messaging protocol
• Ricochet - serverless anonymous messaging
• RetroShare - free software for encrypted, serverless email, Instant messaging, BBS and file-sharing based on a friend-to-friend network built on GPG
• TOX - p2p voice/video messaging system that has plugins for Pidgin and Adium
• Bitmessage

P2P (and federated server) social networks

• Nostr - inspired by Scuttlebutt, but much simpler and more extensible
• Scuttlebutt
• PeerTweet - another p2p Twitter
• Bitchute - a p2p youtube using WebTorrent
• GitTorrent - a decentralised Github
• ZeroNet - crypto based decentralised websites
• Play - a torrent site on ZeroNet
• SamsaraP2P - new social network startup, donate to 1NLTpthtWmJdtqg9t8Xr3uK3jDd2keVdqH
• Aether - “It's Fairly Similar to Reddit, But It Doesn’t Have a Server Somewhere”, see interview with Burak Nehbit, Aether Dev
• Rumble - a decentralised and meshable Twitter-like system
• Ind.ie - Stratosphere - an interesting p2p social network project to keep an eye on
• Friendica - federated server social network
• GNU social - was status.net
• Hubzilla - the "everything is a channel" federated social network (was the red matrix)

Handbook of Peer-to-Peer Networking

• Xuemin Shen, Heather Yu, John Buford, Mursalin Akon,
• Springer | 2009 | ISBN: 0387097503 | 1403 pages | PDF | 10,2 MB
• torrent hash: C3BA9770 7C9E3C80 019DD55E 2207529A B876700D
• blocked in US?

Torrent sites

• Top21 torrent search sites
• TorrentFreak - the place where breaking news, BitTorrent and copyright collide
• KICKASS Torrents
• ExtraTorrent
• Play: A P2P Distributed Torrent Site That’s Impossible to Shut Down

See also

• Trust network
• Cloud
• What is P2P?
• Peer-to-peer (meme)
• P2P Foundation Wiki
• a java applet that does a good job illustrating p2p as it relates to bittorrent
• Breaking bottlenecks - a new algorithm enables much faster dissemination of information through self-organizing networks with a few scattered choke points
• The P2P mode of production - an Indiano manifesto
• Decentralising Telecom
• Lessons learned from the Amazon cloud outage
• Top torrent sites as of 2017
• App.co - portal for Dapps across all technologies
• P2P forever - p2p resources