I like to read the discussion boards for MaidSafe from time to time. [1] In their case at least, serving content would not be mandatory to benefit from the p2p

I like to read the discussion boards for MaidSafe from time to time. [1] In their case at least, serving content would not be mandatory to benefit from the p2p aspect. That's for those running a vault. And even then a vault wouldn't know what it's serving to whom. Nor would the recipient be able to determine the IPs of any of the vaults it connects to. On the performance side, I think that depends on what's being attempted and how. MaidSafers like to reiterate the notion that popular content will have chunks cached more broadly across the network, but that is only one aspect. There are other things that are not intuitive about how to develop a distributed application with no central authority. And their current model does not include sharing computing power (no Function-as-a-Service type of thing); just storage and bandwidth. [1] https://safenetforum.org/ https://safenetforum.org/