How would you connect 10 million peers with decentralized p2p?

[TankGirl]

Originally posted by assorted
i don't understand why a p2p proggie hasn't used a system similar to what dynamic ip people use to get their own web addresses (like http://www.dyndns.org). every username/password connects to a central server that records their current IP address. When you check someones hotlist, you check that server which spits back the ip address currently associated with that username and then you contact them. It's what audiognome needed ages ago to make their pnp thingie work (and he never implemented i don't think).

i pointed out that there might be a legal problem with this idea some time ago, and someone responded that if this kind of lookup from a centralized server was illegal, then the backbone of the web is illegal for associating a warez url with a numerical ip address. I think that person was correct and this kind of lookup is pretty much on the safe side legally.

If there even was any question, the safest way to do it legally would be to get a 3rd party company to provide the service of connecting username to ip addy. maybe dyndns.org for example; since they are essentially doing this service already. that would make any legal arguement the media conglomerates come up with all the more difficult.

Originally posted by multi inter user face
scuse my silly questions.....
would it be possible for each user to broadcast
what would be similar to a dynamic ip?, may be an encrypted version or something ?
that only a host or client with the right soft ware could find using ....say a search?

Both these ideas are related to the challenge of getting connected to the network in the first place. For this challenge DNS is a useful mapping system and can be used in a number of ways. SA_Dave pointed well out the problems of centralized DNS services so we don’t want to be in any way dependent on them. But that does not prevent us using these services to our benefit should they be conveniently available and usable without compromising peer security or privacy.

There is no need for every peer to regularly publish or broadcast its own port/IP info to the outside world. It is enough that a dedicated fraction of peers will provide some kind of DNS-mapped entry point service to the network. There are many ways to implement this, and some of them could be used side by side.

As suggested by assorted, some peers could make themselves publicly available on dynamic DNS addresses, acting directly as ‘doormen’ to the network. This approach might work at least for peers who wouldn’t mind revealing their IP addresses publicly and using a fixed port for the job.

Peers could also publish ‘host caches’ (IP/port listings of active peers providing entry point services) on personal websites. Entrusting a p2p client with FTP interface to upload such listings would not be too big a job. This approach would have many benefits. The bandwidth load of the entry point service would be on your ISP’s server and not on your own line. You would not need to reveal your own IP number and network identity in the lists you publish - a random selection of available peers would do, and also help to balance the load between entry point peers. And using encryption you could also publish entry point lists for closed groups. A few pages on private websites would be enough to keep a smaller private group well connected; a few thousand similar pages could handle a population of millions, providing a wide and hard-to-attack entry surface from the public DNS-mapped webspace.

Apart from the challenge of getting connected to the network is the challenge of re-establishing your social connectivity in it. Assuming you can hook yourself in with the help of peer X whose IP address and port you got from a known web address, your next question to X is: "where are my friends A, B and C?" Or: "can you find me somebody from group G so that I can connect to it?" As peer X (like any other peer) can know the IP addresses and ports only for a small fraction of the entire 10 million peer population, there must be a smart infrastructure to help peers to search each other by identities. If we have an internal connectivity system where any gatekeeper peer can help you to find the specific peers and groups you are looking for from among 10 million sparsely connected peers say in a minute or two, we can build working decentralized hotlists and communities on it.

- tg