ABSTRACT
Peer-to-peer (P2P) networking is a paradigm where a set of user machines on the Internet communicates with one another to share resources without the help of a central authority. Geographical boundaries become irrelevant and the absence of any central authority promises spontaneous growth and freedom from censorship. Peers include collaborators and competitors, and the orderly resource sharing has to be implemented through decentralized protocols. Scalability is an integral part of this concept — no P2P system is worth looking, at unless it scales to millions of machines around the globe.
