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.

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

P2P projects

• Project Douglas
• IPFS: The Permanent Web - IPFS is a global, versioned, peer-to-peer filesystem
• The TOR project
• I2P Anonymous Network
• RetroShare - free software for encrypted, serverless email, Instant messaging, BBS and file-sharing based on a friend-to-friend network built on GPG
• The Freenet Project
• guifi.net
• P2P DNS
• Tonika - social routing with organic security
• TomP2P
• Scalaris
• Bazar - software developed by Garum for inter-cooperative trading
• 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
• Bitmessage
• DeadDrops.com - public file-sharing with USB sticks
• MaidSafe - could well be the holy grail of p2p!
• Bitcloud
• Dark Wallet - Airbitz & Dark Wallet Devs Win Bitcoin Hackathon with DarkMarket!
• OpenBazaar - decentralised marketplace
• BitXBay - another decentralised marketplace
• TOX - p2p voice/video messaging system that has plugins for Pidgin and Adium
• Ricochet - serverless anonymous messaging
• Aether - “It's Fairly Similar to Reddit, But It Doesn’t Have a Server Somewhere”, see interview with Burak Nehbit, Aether Dev
• Ind.ie - Stratosphere - an interesting p2p social network project to keep an eye on

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

• TorrentFreak - the place where breaking news, BitTorrent and copyright collide
• KICKASS Torrents
• ExtraTorrent

See also

• Trust network
• Cloud
• Freenet philosophy
• 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
• P2P-Based Economy: The Political Power Of Peer-To-Peer Networks
• Social, Political, And Economic Issues In A P2P World - Interview With Michel Bauwens
• Breaking bottlenecks - a new algorithm enables much faster dissemination of information through self-organizing networks with a few scattered choke points
• The Future Now - an Interview with David de Ugarte
• The P2P mode of production - an Indiano manifesto
• Say Hola! to the newest route around web censorship
• Decentralising Telecom
• The Mission to Decentralise the Internet
• How Far Can the P2P Revolution Go? - will the sharing economy replace the State? by Jeffrey Tucker

Attachments

• File:Electric_routing_and_concurrent_flow_cutting.pdf
• File:Scalaris.pdf