Direct Connect no longer centralized

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Toast

Direct Connect no longer centralized

Post by Toast » 23 Feb 2010, 17:11

Times are changing and since BMs inital implementation of DHT ive seen some new stuff coming up like Dtella and Roothub although Roothub isnt ADC is still a decentralized hub.

So what is decentralization

The concept of decentralization is to remove the central structure of a network such that each peer can communicate as an equal to any other peer. When a peer (a) connects to a decentralized network it connects to another peer (b) to announce that it is live, b will then in turn announce to all peers it is connected to (c, d, e, f etc.) that a is alive, c, d, e, f etc repeating the pattern. Once a has announced that it is alive it can send a search request on to b, which in turn passes it on to c, d, e, f etc. If for example c has a copy of the file requested by a it transmits a reply to b which passes it back to a which can then open a direct connection to d and download the file.

Now this has both good and bad aspects lets break em down

Advantages of a decentralized architecture

They are more rugged, because a single point of failure is eliminated. They are also harder to shut down.

Disadvantages of a decentralized architecture

Searching a decentralized network is slower. You are not guaranteed to find a file even if it is on the network because it may be too far away for a search request to reach the peer which has it before the TTL expires.

I know many old timers on hubs etc wants Direct Connect remain as it is but times are changing networks have to adapt and restructure in order to survive now imagine a proxy network like the onion routing

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onion_routing

all anonymous downloading via proxy addresses thats one way to adapt i know that there are bittorent trackers set up in this manor

http://torrentfreak.com/bittorrent-hydr ... or-090725/

it isn't impossible to set a DHT nexus point behind this and make client use this just a matter of figuring out how :)

http://www.torproject.org/hidden-services.html.en

so i hope i given some ideas of how to make decentralization anonymous to the developers of these kind of applications.

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