Once upon a time, before "p2p" was even a term and when Napster ruled the rose, there was a system called Mojo Nation. It was a distributed storage system that

Once upon a time, before "p2p" was even a term and when Napster ruled the rose, there was a system called Mojo Nation. It was a distributed storage system that broke a file into distinct pieces identified by a hash and then spread those pieces out to peer nodes that would return them when asked and the map of what pieces were needed to rebuild the file was stored in a service called a tracker, which existed as public services and which you could run yourself for private files. To incentivise people to keep their agent running and serving disk space you would get credits for serving data chunks or acting as a relay node (NAT traversal was still in its infancy and so other peers would act as supernodes to forward traffic for you.) This system used what was called "Paris Metro Pricing" which basically means you could spend your credits to move to the front of the line when it came time to pull data. It was complicated. Strong crypto end-to-end, stacking relay nodes enabled you to do Tor-like onion routing, centralized servers that would provide a persistent backing store for the peer storage when there was not a sufficient critical mass of peers for a part of the storage grid, etc. A real hairball of complexity that wheezed and groaned but somehow managed to deliver bits. "But people just want to share music and movies." said one engineer. "All of this complexity is silly. Let's cut out the persistence and make it easy for someone to just share a file." And he was right. "No." said the people running the company, "that would end up getting us sued into oblivion." After seeing what happened to others in the space at the time it appears they were right too. So our diligent engineer took an axe to the open source code. He stripped out the crypto, streamlined the payments to eliminate a central broker and just operate between two peers (e.g. tit for tat) and eliminated the persistence. Each "file" became its own distinct peer network. He created a true MVP for the system before anyone knew what that term meant. He called the system BitTorrent. And now we just need to add back the crypto and the circle will be complete... [The unfortunate reality is that the math just does not work out. It works well for ephemeral, popular data where you can maintain the peer grid, but not for a lot of files that have only a small set of peers that are interested in any particulare file. We are not talking about long-tail torrents with a few people who might be downloading at any particular time; you and your family might have a short-term interest in video's of juniors little league game but after a few weeks no one will continue to participate in that particular peer group nor are they likely to rejoin, but the service must still maintain the backing store. Perhaps this makes sense as a pivot to try to re-capture a large set of peers for some other, more valuable, distribution service, but I honestly don't see this particular product going very far.]