by Bozho | Jul 4, 2019 | Aggregated, Opinions, p2p
Every now and then one has a half-baked idea about some project that they aren’t likely to be able to do because of lack of time. I’ve written about such random app ideas before, but they were mostly about small apps. Here I’d like to share an idea for something a bit bigger (and therefore harder to spare time for) – a generic P2P network client. P2P networks are popular in various domains, most notably file sharing and cryptocurrencies. However, in theory they can be applied to many more problems, social networks, search engines, ride sharing, distributed AI, etc. All of these examples have been implemented in p2p context, and they even work okay, but they lack popularity. The popularity is actually the biggest issue with these applications – in order to get a service to be popular, in many cases you need a network effect – a p2p file sharing with 100 users doesn’t benefit from being p2p. A social network with 100 users is, well, useless. And it is hard to get traction with these p2p services because they require an additional step – installing software. You can’t just open a webpage and register, you have to install some custom software that will be used to join the p2p network. P2P networks are distributed, i.e. there is no central node that has control over what happens. That control is held over the binary that gets installed – and it’s usually open source. And you need that binary in order to establish an overlay network. These networks reuse the internet’s transport layer, but do not rely on the...
by Bozho | Nov 10, 2018 | Aggregated, Developer tips, dht, distributed, Opinions, p2p
Distributed p2p technologies have always been fascinating to me. Bittorrent is cool not because you can download pirated content for free, but because it’s an amazing piece of technology. At some point I read and researched a lot about how DHTs (distributed hash tables) work. DHTs are not part of the original bittorrent protocol, but after trackers were increasingly under threat to be closed for copyright infringment, “trackerless” features were added to the protocol. A DHT is distributed among all peers and holds information about which peer holds what data. Once you are connected to a peer, you can query it for their knowledge on who has what. During my research (which was with no particular purpose) I took a note on many resources that I thought useful for understanding how DHTs work and possibly implementing something ontop of them in the future. In fact, a DHT is a “shared database”, “just like” a blockchain. You can’t trust it as much, but proving digital events does not require a blockchain anyway. My point here is – there is a lot more cool stuff to distributed / p2p systems than blockchain. And maybe way more practical stuff. It’s important to note that the DHT used in BitTorrent is Kademlia. You’ll see a lot about it below. Anyway, the point of this post is to share the resources that I collected. For my own reference and for everyone who wants to start somewhere on the topic of DHTs. Bittorrent DHT protocol – a nice explanation how DHT is used in bittorent (here’s a list of all bittorrent protocol enhancements) Kademlia: design...
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