Peer-to-Peer Frequently Asked Questions

N.B. This FAQ focuses on the very nebulous term "p2p system". There's not a single answer that maps exactly to all peer-to-peer systems; this FAQ does its best to provide a general answer when possible, and provide concrete examples where it makes sense.

This FAQ also provides multiple answers per question, from various authors. There is no single objective perspective, so more viewpoints are invited: file a pull request!

1. Sounds great, but will it scale?

From @staltz:

Yes. It is rare to find a p2p service that does not scale. They are distributed systems by design, and most distributed systems are meant to scale. You could say, then, that many distributed systems take cues from p2p systems in order to scale properly. As a good example, Skype was built by the same engineers who built Kazaa, and Skype internally used p2p distribution in order to alleviate the load from any single node, and to save costs. Bittorrent also thrives in situations where there are a high number of peers.

Like centralized systems, performance will suffer if the load is not distributed. A torrent file with only one seed and thousands of leechers would struggle to initially share to the first wave of peers. Unlike a centralized system though, once that first wave of peers downloads a copy, the bandwidth for that torrent data to be served grows exponentially.

2. If websites are hosted on p2p, what happens when no peers are online?

From @noffle:

The same result as when a centralized website goes down: it isn't available.

The difference is that peer-to-peer networks distribute the power to host. I could run a peer serving my website on a server. Instantly I have the same website availability as a traditional centralized website. The difference is that there may be many peers in the swarm that are also hosting my website, so if my server goes down, the site will continue to be accessible through those seeding peers.

From @retrohacker:

Many p2p systems, i.e. BitTorrent, are optimized for sharing popular content. The more popular a piece of content, the more available the content becomes. The less popular content is, the less available the content becomes. Popularity in this case is the number of peers actively consuming and sharing a piece of content. The ability to access any piece of content on a p2p network is limited by the availability of peers, no peers no content.

If you share content on a p2p network that you have a vested interest in being always-available, you must invest in maintaining your own highly available peers that share this content. This is not dissimilar to a centralized network, in that you must build highly available infrastructure to share your content. However, unlike a centralized network, you're infrastructure is no longer a single point of failure since you have the benefit of a p2p network supporting you.

In the p2p model, you are not soley responsible for your uptime or performance. If your system falls over, consumers of your content can still fetch from another peer. If there is a spike in popularity of your content, peers will share content amongst eachother reducing the burden on your infrastructure. In many cases this can provide a better overall experience for consumers of your content.

3. What about security? Somebody could share a hacked version of a p2p website?

From @noffle:

It depends what the security model of the system hosting the website uses. There are two commonly tools I know of for ensuring that a copy of data you've received from a potentially untrusted source is authentic:

1. You used the hash of the data to request from the p2p network. If so, the data you receive from a peer can be hashed, and that hash compared against the one used to make the request for the data. IPFS and Secure Scuttlebutt do this. A caveat is that the data is static: the hash never changes and thus neither can the data. A benefit is that content-addressable data can be safely cached indefinitely.

2. You used the public key of the author to request the data from the p2p network. The idea is that every version of the data is cryptographically signed by the data's author, so that any data you download will have a signature can be checked against the public key used to request the data. This guarantees that the data came from the author you expected, and also permits changes to that data, unlike with content-addressed above. Dat, IPFS and SSB all use this approach for dynamic data.

From @matthiasbeyer:

If cryptographic signatures come into play, this is not possible.

Consider a content-addressed system. In such systems, content is addressed via a cryptographic hash which represents the content. For example, a file containing "Hello World" gets a hash "648a6a6ffff". If a peer now tries to fetch content from the network, it does so by asking for the content of "648a6a6ffff". If it gets sent this content, it can then verify with that same hash, whether the content it got is the actual content it requested.

An attacker would be able to host malicious nodes in the network, but as the node which requests the content (your node) can verify that it got what it expected.

4. What about privacy? Everybody in the p2p network can see what I am looking at.

Help contribute an answer to this question!

5. P2P is great, but sometimes you need a single authoritative source of truth

From @matthiasbeyer:

This is not true. Consider git: Each branch could be considered as source of truth (or rather "point of truth"). Branches may depend on eachother, branches may be merged. Branches may not
depend on eachother (git can have multiple "orphan" branches) and may not be merged. Still, they are points of truth. With p2p systems in a decentralized environment, this is true as well. There might never be the one version which is currently the point of truth, but as long as versions of the system can be merged, this is not a problem.

Events in such a system can even be sorted chronologically via vector clocks
where each key is the unique peer hash.

There exists a technology which brings data types to the table which can exist in a p2p system without ever needing a single source of truth. These types are named CRDTs.

From @noffle:

If you are cryptographically signing the data you create (see #3), users can request your content by your public key. In this way you are able to control what data appears in this feed of data, but rely on potentially untrusted peers to distributed that data.

By introducing a monotonic increasing sequence number to each new entry in the signed feed, peers can be assured that no messages were suppressed or censored.

6. What if p2p technology is used by "bad actors"?

From @staltz:

A very common concern with P2P technologies is that they aid crime, piracy, pedophilia, and other bad activities. The upside of not having an authority is also its unfortunate downside. That said, this aspect of information systems is overestimated when compared to other technologies like cars, weapons, hard drives, and kitchen cutlery. Terrorist attacks are carried out often through cars and common knives, yet it seems absurd to common sense that there would be global realtime surveillance of all cars and kitchen knives in order to prevent crimes. On the other hand, information systems by themselves cannot directly cause any physical harm. The absurdity of censoring cars and cutlery should extend also to information systems, or at least the discourse around security and crime prevention should get the priorities right and first address the root causes, the supporting incentives, the real weapons, and the tradeoffs involved.

More about this: https://theintercept.com/2015/11/17/u-s-mass-surveillance-has-no-record-of-thwarting-large-terror-attacks-regardless-of-snowden-leaks/

7. What areas do modern p2p apps still struggle with?

From @noffle:

Apps still seem to have a hard time managing resources, like CPU and network bandwidth. If an app naively tries to download and replicate ALL of the data it sees, it's easy for it to overwhelm the machine it's running on. Many apps still have a ways to go in offering good controls for CPU and bandwidth use.