3 ms·

I just made an analogy, didn't say it was the same thing as the cloud. My point was that in a P2P architecture you must be a server, everyone else must be a se

I just made an analogy, didn't say it was the same thing as the cloud. My point was that in a P2P architecture you must be a server, everyone else must be a server. And being a server is costly. There must be incentives for someone to be a server, and that's not easy. I actually don't remember a single P2P protocol or framework that has solved that problem yet. Perhaps Bitcoin -- for miners only, not for normal nodes.

loup-vaillant 9y ago
It appears BitTorrent solved the problem well enough. There's already an incentive to share, because nodes who don't are eventually ignored by the others (if I recall correctly). As for the operating costs… they don't seem very high unless you're operating a tracker. I mean, it's just a matter of running a BitTorrent client, and not even all the time (unless you want to reliably seed something). The real problem there is the asymmetry of the bandwidth. If we had as much upload as we had download, we wouldn't have any reason not to shoot for a 1:1 ratio.