The Legacy of Peer-to-Peer Systems

fliptop writes:

Over at ACM.org, Carlos Baquero wants to know, what happened to peer-to-peer as a technological concept?

Peer-to-Peer (P2P) systems became famous at the turn of the millennium, mostly due to their support for direct file sharing among users. In the 80s, the music industry had already evolved from selling analogue vinyl records to digital compact disks, but only with the introduction of lossy data-compression techniques, such as the MP3 coding format, it became feasible to upload/download music files among users' personal computers. Still, content had to be catalogued and found, and P2P systems such as Napster emerged to provide that functionality.

Some of the early systems, such as Napster and SETI@Home, exhibited a mix of P2P and classic client-server architecture. Gnutella and Freenet, the second generation of systems, provided a much larger degree of decentralization. The emergence of P2P greatly impacted the business models of the music, and later film, industries. With time, these industries evolved to offer flat rates and subscription services decreasing the incentives for, music or video, file copying and sharing.

[...] Looking at Google trends, we see that the concept almost faded from our lexicon. Nevertheless, the technology is still used; it evolved and became more specialized. A good portion of the fabric beneath modern data centers (web 2.0) and blockchain technology (web 3.0) evolved from early P2P research.

The author chronicles the rise of systems like Gnutella and Freenet, commenting on their benefits and their eventual downfall into obscurity due to routing algorithm problems that had trouble consistently delivering content from local sources, which impacted lookup times. He then continues:

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