Just a little thought for you to reflect on.
Centralized server-client technology is built on deterministic approach and logic. It's your server, under your control, running your software. You ask it to do certain things, and you expect it to serve you and your clients just as told. If your server stays up, you expect your service to stay up; if your server goes down, you know your service will go down.
Decentralized p2p is built on statistic approach and logic. You have a random collection of peers coming online and going offline unpredictably. You can't count on any particular peer to be online at any given time; instead you have to count on the statistic online habits of a peer population. You can't count on any particular peer to provide any critical resources at any given time; instead you have to maximize the statistical chances of having a critical amount of collective resources available most of the time.
The third logical approach is organic or bio-logical. Organic technology will be based on various biological ideas about how living systems sustain themselves, communicate with each other, grow, procreate and so on. Biological systems contain apparently both centralized and decentralized features but rather than being a mixture of the two opposite technologies they are really a class of their own, following their own functional logic. They are essentially self-organizing, self-sustaining, self-adjusting, self-defining entities. As that same description applies also perfectly to the various online groups and communities, organic logic and technology may prove out to be very useful for p2p, especially for socially intelligent p2p.
- tg
