Five Reasons Why Peer-to-Peer Networks Will Change The World

Peer-to-Peer is a term from network technology, but its implications go beyond that. Peer-to-Peer could have a strong impact on how collaboration in the world works.

In computer science such networks consist of nodes (peers) working together based on equals rights. This is different to today’s predominant paradigm in networking, client/server.

In the client/server-world, the client is consuming a service provided by the server, and so there is a big difference between the two as they simple have different roles. This somehow reflects the way societies are organized today: You have big companies or organizations who presumably provide services to people. Google or Amazon are good examples for such companies. Any secret service or social welfare organization would do as an example for the second group. All these parties today have their servers, and the whole world more or less depends on them.

The way computer networks work today corresponds to the way societies are organized. If society change, its networks change too. And vice versa!

Today many people predict a great future for such P2P-Networks. Technology has often affected human societies — and it could happen again soon.

While in the past there still has been some sort of isolation between human communities, today this changes rapidly. Not only traveling has gotten easier, communication as well. It is not only the rise of E-Mail or internet telephony. Many areas are involved, and the speed of change is not going down, it is still increasing. Take automatic translations for instance: They have now become close to being usable in many situations. If you wish to understand the essentials of an online article written in Chinese, there is a good chance that an automatic translation could help you understand at least the basics, even if you d not speak a word of Chinese.

Everything comes down to collaboration between humans — and between machines as well.

Collaboration between computers is what P2P-Networking is all about. If some progress is achieved in this area, collaboration between humans will profit as well. The rise of cryptocurrencies is a well-know example for that. Their potential to facilitate payments is so stunning, that almost everybody nowadays is showing interest. Not only the strong believers, even the critics cannot1G ignore them. They feel that ignorance would mean ignorance towards fears quite reasonable.

Similar things already happened in the past: A new technology can wipe out the foundation of many people’s standard of living. Consequences can be unemployment and poverty. No way has been found in the past to stop such developments. The loom will never come back into working people’s room. Whatever work P2P networks will take away from people, it will never come back.

Let us look at the positive side of it and count down five reasons why we can profit from P2P.

1. Cost Reduction

P2P-Networks can share resources like disk space or computing power easier than that will ever be possible in a server-dominated infrastructure. Sharing such resources means reducing cost for the individual. You are not longer alone. You are port of the swarm, and you move in the swarm.

An important server infrastructure always needs to be highly available and is in need of backups on a regular basis. Its data must be replicated. Sometimes data mirrors are needed to minimize the risk of losses or outage.

All that costs a lot of money. A lot of work power is needed to keep everything up and running. It means that a lot of people need to collaborate in order to fulfill these tasks.

In P2P an essential part of this collaboration tasks is standardized in such a way, that it can be taken away from humans and can be done by machines.

2. No Servers

Servers are not only hardware, they are also gigantic software. So-called application servers were designed to work as containers for a very large number of applications. But their complexity soon grew out of control. Nevertheless, in banks and insurance companies and in many other places they still remain omnipresent today.

Their maintenance costs are enormous, and application servers have not developed in the same speed as for example programming languages have. Consequently these applications are not only very expensive, their maintenance needs specific know-how that is not up-to-date. Older (and more expensive) IT experts can maintain them. Younger people cannot — and they do not want to either.

As soon as there is a way to tear such applications apart and turn them into more maintainable pieces that can work together, you have entered the world of P2P. It will happen. The dinosaurs will just die out and vanish from earth. Smaller animals will take over.

3. High Availability

P2P networks are very strong in terms of redundancy and and data mirroring. There is just no single point of failure. What counts is not the availability of a single server, but the number of peers working together at a specific point in time. If a single peers goes down or is getting unavailable, it does not mean that the whole network will stop working. Other peers can take over the work.

Here you have a kind of resilience that you will not find anywhere else in the internet. The survival of the system does not depend on the survival of a single part. There is no concentration of power, no bottleneck.

OK, big companies already guarantee high availability of their services. Did you ever have the problem that a google search did not work because the servers where not available? Never! It just does not happen. Still, in that case you very much depend on the reliability of Google. Today many people doubt it is a good idea to depend so much on a company like google.

4. Censorship Resistance

Censorship exists in many countries. States can restrict access to specific information as long as they control the servers and the companies providing it.

Censorship resistance of P2P-Networks stems from the fact that these networks tend to be world wide. As long as there is no world government controlling every single computer on earth, nobody will be able to censor information available in such a network.

Data can be replicated easily between peers. If a state decides to censor any kind of information, it can only control the peers inside its country, but as the network is world wide, information will remain available. No state can easily cut its global internet connection, as this would affect many relevant areas in business and economy.

You might think of North Korea. Right, this country still denies access to the internet to the majority of its population. Global P2P networks will of course also not be available in such a country. But it also implies that North Korea remains very much isolated from global economy. It is a poor company, and it will suffer from severe disadvantages, as long as it keeps its people ignorant.

It will be easier for a P2P-Network to sneak into such a country, as it will be for a single server providing information that is not wanted in that specific state.

Except for such exceptions, everybody uses and needs the internet today. That is why computers are connected in many different ways around the world and this can hardly be changed.

P2P networks are not only resilient. They are just free.

5. Bye Bye Intermediaries!

Bitcoin came along around 2009, after a severe financial crisis that lead to profound distrust in banks as intermediaries for financial transactions. At that time it became obvious that banks can fail — and they can still fail when they are “too big to fail”.

The bitcoin network eliminates banks as intermediary for money transfers. Today there are many places in the internet where you can read profound and in depth explanations how this works. It is P2P once again. Not a perfect system of course. Its flaws are also well known and also discussed world wide.

You must take into account that this is still young technology. Ten years are a very short period of time for a technology to develop into maturity. Nobody can tell you when it will happen and how it will happen. It will happen: “Bye Bye intermediaries!”