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I'm all for P2P solutions and a more distributed Internet, but I'd like to add a few items to that list. - Security in a P2P system is harder to get right. The

I'm all for P2P solutions and a more distributed Internet, but I'd like to add a few items to that list. - Security in a P2P system is harder to get right. The system is distributed and each member has to trust more parties. This significantly increases the attack surface compared with a client that just needs to trust a single server. - Not everyone is connected all the time, so network partitions happen constantly. It's hard to maintain a consistent state such as a chat log, not to mention anything more real-timey like the state of some real-time game. - STUN and other NAT traversal techniques don't always work. NAT is horrible, creating connectivity between NATed clients is always a dice roll. - Bandwidth - A dedicated server can have a lot of upstream bandwidth (to the clients). In homes, it typical to find (in some countries at least) connections that are heavily biased towards the downstream. So a 100Mbps connection (downstream) might have a 2Mbps connection upstream. Now say you want to have an 8 people video conference call, and all of your users have a 2Mbit uplink and need to send 7 copies of their video stream... What if it's a 20 person video call? What if half of them are on mobile? - Bootstrapping - every P2P system still needs to have dedicated servers for bootstrapping. There are no pure P2P systems AFAIK. - Client versioning and patching - a lot harder in a P2P system. With a central server - you just update the server and everything works. With a network of clients, things are trickier and you run the risk of partitioning the P2P network between different client versions. - Monetization in P2P is hard(er).

littlestymaar 9y ago
You're right in all points (almost[1]), but those are mostly technical issues that can be solved with some work[2], except for two points : - the bandwidth problem is real, but there is no more technological limitation[3], it's merely a commercial problem: client have no use for huge uplinks, then providers don't sell them. It's a bit of a chicken & egg problem. - the monetization problem is the root of all sins in that case … [1] on the client versioning & patching side, you underestimate the complexity of distributing a web client, with CDN, browser caches and clients who never reload their page, you can also end up with a lot of client lagging behind in updates. [2] and centralized system also have their own issues (scaling anyone ?) [3] ADSL was asymmetric because the asymmetry widened the reception bandwidth, which would otherwise be too low. With optical fibers, you don't have such limitations.

littlestymaar 9y ago

You're right in all points (almost[1]), but those are mostly technical issues that can be solved with some work[2], except for two points : - the bandwidth problem is real, but there is no more technological limitation[3], it's merely a commercial problem: client have no use for huge uplinks, then providers don't sell them. It's a bit of a chicken & egg problem. - the monetization problem is the root of all sins in that case … [1] on the client versioning & patching side, you underestimate the complexity of distributing a web client, with CDN, browser caches and clients who never reload their page, you can also end up with a lot of client lagging behind in updates. [2] and centralized system also have their own issues (scaling anyone ?) [3] ADSL was asymmetric because the asymmetry widened the reception bandwidth, which would otherwise be too low. With optical fibers, you don't have such limitations.