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Blockchain and P2P Filesharing: Repeating History of Scalability Failures (Blockchain Society 3/?)
What “crypto” can(’t) learn from failures of others
In the year 2001, same year BitTorrent was invented, another p2p network, that was already established and based on exactly the same principles, was already failing. It had become the victim of its own success: it was reaching 150.000 users, and its community-operated directory servers could not keep up. Connect a new “server”, and three hours later it was at its bandwidth limits, dying.
What does this have to do with crypto? If you have tried to fully synch a crypto wallet lately — for example, a full Ethereum client — you have likely seen some of these issues, too. This “distributed” technology has scalability problems that, to somebody who started his “online career” unwittingly documenting the demise of the p2p network mentioned above, look startlingly familiar.
In this article I will try to describe the root of the problem, how it relates to crypto, and how it has been solved for p2p. And also why, in the crypto world, these solutions can be applied only partially, if at all.
