I followed somewhat the history of the various file sharing protocols, from Napster and OpenNap to Gnutella to Bittorrent. None of them really stayed totally p

I followed somewhat the history of the various file sharing protocols, from Napster and OpenNap to Gnutella to Bittorrent. None of them really stayed totally p2p. With Gnutella, nodes would slow network connections and weird NAT conditions would pop in and pop out. So eventually things changed, and some Gnutella nodes which were online for some time period and had a fast network connection would self-elect as super-nodes (or ultrapeers, or various names). In Gnutella, theoretically ever node was a server and a client, but eventually, Gnutella server/clients would hook into to these super-nodes. If you want the maximum amount of content, both centralization and decentralization have their drawbacks. You tend to find elements of both (with Gnutella and Bittorrent too).