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Death by Fake Decentralization (Blockchain Society 4/?)
Why BitTorrent survived while eDonkey died, and what does this mean for the future of electronic payments
As I mentioned in my previous article, BitTorrent was not the first network to do what BitTorrent does. So why did it thrive where others died? How did it become the main mode of sharing large files on the internet, even though previous systems were easier to understand and more convenient for their users? What can we learn from it?
Let us look at how those networks work:
In eDonkey 2000, the network I talked about previously, the nodes that keep the list of available files, the “servers”, form a network. A client that wants to share an file (a “seed” in BitTorrent parlance, let’s make it a triangle) connects to one of the servers, and announces that it has a file to share. Eventually, clients interested in the file (In BitTorrent parlance, “peers”) query the servers, find the sources for the file (the triangle, and each other), and begin download.
Like the modern crypto networks, the system was “decentralized”: the directory servers were operated by volunteers, just like miners and full clients on, say, Bitcoin or Ethereum. I say “decentralized”, in quotes, because, while it was distributed all over…
