Well, that depends on what kind of ddos we're talking about. The primitive ones simply pick a server and flood it with some kind of request. The distributed par

Well, that depends on what kind of ddos we're talking about. The primitive ones simply pick a server and flood it with some kind of request. The distributed part makes it harder to block and provides more bandwidth than most single points can take If you make your content distributed it can be mirrored by many more nodes than are needed to satisfy demand, removing some of the asymmetry while also making it more difficult for the attacker to pick his targets. Note that p2p networks can also respond to demand. E.g. in torrents clients don't seed all the content they have all the time, they first check statistics which swarms could use the bandwidth most. So if there were some content under attack by fake downloaders it would look like a swarm in need of extra bandwidth and thus more real nodes would join it to serve content, thus making the attack more costly. > Even if you had a system where people were prioritized based on how much they were sharing, there are a lot of ways to get around that protocol with a big enough botnet. With a big enough botnet you can also take out any ddos protection service.