5 ms·

Anyone remember the P2P craze of the early 2000s'? Or was it late 90s? What's left over from that? Freenet? What I'm always wondering about: Someone needs to f

by beders 7y ago

Anyone remember the P2P craze of the early 2000s'? Or was it late 90s? What's left over from that? Freenet? What I'm always wondering about: Someone needs to foot the server/bandwidth bills. Who? If you run a Pi on your home network and serve requests with your 5MB/s upload: That's fine. More power to you. We need more of that. (and in that case, you are paying your ISP) But the transformation envisioned and the bandwidth and compute required doesn't come for free. Someone's gotta pay. In things like dollars. How can this work?

clarry 7y ago
Even freenet is kind of a ghost town..
Proven 7y ago
Yep. > Someone's gotta pay There are quasi[1]-free market capitalists in crypto community who think that because many ISPs don't throttle and provide "unlimited" upload quotas means they can build a business on that platform. If IPFS or any similar project actually took off and home users begun to strain ISP networks, pretty soon there would be quotas, price hikes and throttling. Someone's gotta pay. [1] ICO-ing a file sharing coin, while demanding Net Neutrality
rohan1024 7y ago
It's not the cost that's preventing what you mentioned. It's the ISPs which don't allow incoming traffic and have symmetric NATs all over there network. IPV6 is here and we should have gotten rid of NAT long ago but there's no incentive for corporations or ISPs so we are stuck here.
- beders 7y ago
  That's true as well. ISPs have no interest allowing end users to host anything meaningful.
  - ronsor 7y ago
    well it's against the terms of service (though if you have no other ISP options, it's more like terms of slavery)
zzzcpan 7y ago
P2P craze gave birth to BitTorrent. And p2p bandwidth does actually come for free for modern broadband ISPs with fiber to the building kind of infrastructure. In fact p2p allows ISPs to even save on expensive bandwidth by pushing more traffic over local and inexpensive routes that sit unused. Although bandwidth costs are already insignificant, take like $1 per month per consumer tops, so it shouldn't even be of any concern.
kragen 7y ago
BitTorrent, Tor, Bitcoin, and the other cryptocurrencies are the results of "the P2P craze of the early 2000s". They resulted in Wikileaks, Snowden, and Trump, not to mention the current blockchain feeding frenzy. Freenet is, by comparison, somewhat less important. I'm puzzled by your comment because in the second paragraph you provide the answer to the question your third paragraph is about. If people are paying their ISPs for bandwidth in things like dollars, what's the problem? It's true that bandwidth is more expensive when you buy it retail from ISPs rather than wholesale in data centers, but only by a factor of two or three, so this is only an issue for the most bandwidth-intensive applications, such as Netflix streaming. Bandwidth and computation are extremely cheap now, so I don't think this is really an issue. As a point of comparison, when I started browsing the web in a graphical web browser in 1993, I was running it on a ≈100-MIPS RS/6000 with a couple of dozen other people. There were nearly a thousand web servers (in the world, not on the RS/6000), but each one could only serve about one or two hits per second, mostly on machines similar to that one. Shortly after that, my university, with a few thousand students, upgraded its shared connection to 45 megabits per second, as part of a contract to manage a supercomputer center in another state. My cellphone runs about 10,000 MIPS, and would have no trouble handling 5000 hits per second; this is more than the entire WWW at the time and well into 1994. Most homes in rich countries have more individual bandwidth than I was sharing with hundreds of other active users at the time. We don't have a shortage of bandwidth or computation. We have a shortage of community, a shortage of innovation, a shortage of cooperation, a shortage of imagination, and a shortage of freedom. But bandwidth and computation are abundant in a way that was unimaginable in the days when we built the WWW.
api 7y ago
The main barrier to P2P isn't cost or bandwidth or algorithms. The main barrier is NAT. As long as IPv4 with P2P-unfriendly symmetric NAT is the dominant way of accessing the network, P2P will remain hard and niche. One ugly hack to get around one problem (IPv4 address scarcity) has single-handedly transformed the structure of the Internet from a mesh to a top-down monopoly-driven medium. NAT is like literally Satan. It wouldn't be quite as evil if it weren't so often symmetric, but for some odd reason symmetric is what many vendors implement. I can't for the life of me understand why symmetric NAT exists when the same scalability can be achieved with port restricted cone NAT that falls back to symmetric-like behavior if port preservation is not possible due to resource exhaustion. That would yield working P2P >90% of the time instead of <5% of the time.
- Reelin 7y ago
  > NAT is like literally Satan. NAT is merely a tool. Using it to restrict user activity is bad. Using it on your home network to preserve your privacy (ie how many devices you have and what each is doing) is good. There are also other use cases (both good and bad) that I'm omitting here.
  - api 7y ago
    I get what you're saying, but I still disagree. NAT doesn't help privacy either. There are a million plus one ways to fingerprint or track a web browser without knowing anything about the end user's IP. A modern browser presents a ton of surface area. It's also quite easy to track by externally visible IP or IP prefix (e.g. /24 or /64 in IPv6) if you make certain nearly-always-valid assumptions about the timing and sequential nature of user behavior. I think a lot of people just don't grasp how easy tracking actually is. Think of how obscure and sophisticated hardware-level attacks have become: Spectre, RAMBleed, etc. Now imagine the surface area presented by a browser. It can and does get that clever. The only way to really prevent tracking is to use a sandboxed browser with strong anti-tracking features and redirect your traffic... or use a P2P decentralized system! If we didn't have NAT, we'd probably have much more privacy-respecting P2P alternatives to the centralized web and we'd also have easy to use P2P systems for anonymizing requests by bouncing them off other peers. In other words without NAT our privacy tech would be better. I'll be more accurate than saying NAT is Satan. NAT is a massive piece of technical debt. It's a "simple" hack that breaks something fundamental about the Internet, namely namespace unity. That in turn makes a ton of other stuff exponentially more difficult.
_prometheus 7y ago
Exactly. P2P systems historically have dealt with the problem altruistically, or with limited tit-for-tat, which both work in many cases, but have so far failed to work for large scale long-term resilient systems. This is where Bitcoin managed to do something remarkable: achieve high uptimes typical of the best centralized systems, through a very clever, but still open and permissionless, economic incentive structure. Markets have been shown to be extremely useful to create a robust Open Services. More on these ideas here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IfLIoOr4p0A https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IfLIoOr4p0A -- we think this kind of thing is going to lead to extensive, global, public utilities run w/ internet-native money. But it will take a while-- this stuff is extremely difficult to build right now-- it feels similar in nature to very early Web, or pre-unix systems. Lots of hand-rolled primitives, many with the capacity to cause serious failure (not very old cryptography, and complex security questions). Perhaps better programming languages will help us build these systems dramatically faster/easier. For now though, you can see the entire blockchain space wrestling with these problems.

by beders 7y ago

clarry 7y ago

Even freenet is kind of a ghost town..

Proven 7y ago

Yep. > Someone's gotta pay There are quasi[1]-free market capitalists in crypto community who think that because many ISPs don't throttle and provide "unlimited" upload quotas means they can build a business on that platform. If IPFS or any similar project actually took off and home users begun to strain ISP networks, pretty soon there would be quotas, price hikes and throttling. Someone's gotta pay. [1] ICO-ing a file sharing coin, while demanding Net Neutrality

rohan1024 7y ago

It's not the cost that's preventing what you mentioned. It's the ISPs which don't allow incoming traffic and have symmetric NATs all over there network. IPV6 is here and we should have gotten rid of NAT long ago but there's no incentive for corporations or ISPs so we are stuck here.

beders 7y ago
That's true as well. ISPs have no interest allowing end users to host anything meaningful.
- ronsor 7y ago
  well it's against the terms of service (though if you have no other ISP options, it's more like terms of slavery)

zzzcpan 7y ago

P2P craze gave birth to BitTorrent. And p2p bandwidth does actually come for free for modern broadband ISPs with fiber to the building kind of infrastructure. In fact p2p allows ISPs to even save on expensive bandwidth by pushing more traffic over local and inexpensive routes that sit unused. Although bandwidth costs are already insignificant, take like $1 per month per consumer tops, so it shouldn't even be of any concern.

kragen 7y ago

BitTorrent, Tor, Bitcoin, and the other cryptocurrencies are the results of "the P2P craze of the early 2000s". They resulted in Wikileaks, Snowden, and Trump, not to mention the current blockchain feeding frenzy. Freenet is, by comparison, somewhat less important. I'm puzzled by your comment because in the second paragraph you provide the answer to the question your third paragraph is about. If people are paying their ISPs for bandwidth in things like dollars, what's the problem? It's true that bandwidth is more expensive when you buy it retail from ISPs rather than wholesale in data centers, but only by a factor of two or three, so this is only an issue for the most bandwidth-intensive applications, such as Netflix streaming. Bandwidth and computation are extremely cheap now, so I don't think this is really an issue. As a point of comparison, when I started browsing the web in a graphical web browser in 1993, I was running it on a ≈100-MIPS RS/6000 with a couple of dozen other people. There were nearly a thousand web servers (in the world, not on the RS/6000), but each one could only serve about one or two hits per second, mostly on machines similar to that one. Shortly after that, my university, with a few thousand students, upgraded its shared connection to 45 megabits per second, as part of a contract to manage a supercomputer center in another state. My cellphone runs about 10,000 MIPS, and would have no trouble handling 5000 hits per second; this is more than the entire WWW at the time and well into 1994. Most homes in rich countries have more individual bandwidth than I was sharing with hundreds of other active users at the time. We don't have a shortage of bandwidth or computation. We have a shortage of community, a shortage of innovation, a shortage of cooperation, a shortage of imagination, and a shortage of freedom. But bandwidth and computation are abundant in a way that was unimaginable in the days when we built the WWW.

api 7y ago

The main barrier to P2P isn't cost or bandwidth or algorithms. The main barrier is NAT. As long as IPv4 with P2P-unfriendly symmetric NAT is the dominant way of accessing the network, P2P will remain hard and niche. One ugly hack to get around one problem (IPv4 address scarcity) has single-handedly transformed the structure of the Internet from a mesh to a top-down monopoly-driven medium. NAT is like literally Satan. It wouldn't be quite as evil if it weren't so often symmetric, but for some odd reason symmetric is what many vendors implement. I can't for the life of me understand why symmetric NAT exists when the same scalability can be achieved with port restricted cone NAT that falls back to symmetric-like behavior if port preservation is not possible due to resource exhaustion. That would yield working P2P >90% of the time instead of <5% of the time.

Reelin 7y ago
> NAT is like literally Satan. NAT is merely a tool. Using it to restrict user activity is bad. Using it on your home network to preserve your privacy (ie how many devices you have and what each is doing) is good. There are also other use cases (both good and bad) that I'm omitting here.
- api 7y ago
  I get what you're saying, but I still disagree. NAT doesn't help privacy either. There are a million plus one ways to fingerprint or track a web browser without knowing anything about the end user's IP. A modern browser presents a ton of surface area. It's also quite easy to track by externally visible IP or IP prefix (e.g. /24 or /64 in IPv6) if you make certain nearly-always-valid assumptions about the timing and sequential nature of user behavior. I think a lot of people just don't grasp how easy tracking actually is. Think of how obscure and sophisticated hardware-level attacks have become: Spectre, RAMBleed, etc. Now imagine the surface area presented by a browser. It can and does get that clever. The only way to really prevent tracking is to use a sandboxed browser with strong anti-tracking features and redirect your traffic... or use a P2P decentralized system! If we didn't have NAT, we'd probably have much more privacy-respecting P2P alternatives to the centralized web and we'd also have easy to use P2P systems for anonymizing requests by bouncing them off other peers. In other words without NAT our privacy tech would be better. I'll be more accurate than saying NAT is Satan. NAT is a massive piece of technical debt. It's a "simple" hack that breaks something fundamental about the Internet, namely namespace unity. That in turn makes a ton of other stuff exponentially more difficult.

_prometheus 7y ago

Exactly. P2P systems historically have dealt with the problem altruistically, or with limited tit-for-tat, which both work in many cases, but have so far failed to work for large scale long-term resilient systems. This is where Bitcoin managed to do something remarkable: achieve high uptimes typical of the best centralized systems, through a very clever, but still open and permissionless, economic incentive structure. Markets have been shown to be extremely useful to create a robust Open Services. More on these ideas here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IfLIoOr4p0A https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IfLIoOr4p0A -- we think this kind of thing is going to lead to extensive, global, public utilities run w/ internet-native money. But it will take a while-- this stuff is extremely difficult to build right now-- it feels similar in nature to very early Web, or pre-unix systems. Lots of hand-rolled primitives, many with the capacity to cause serious failure (not very old cryptography, and complex security questions). Perhaps better programming languages will help us build these systems dramatically faster/easier. For now though, you can see the entire blockchain space wrestling with these problems.