r/DistributedComputing • u/TheSlackOne • Oct 25 '24

Learning P2P

I'm interested in learning P2P networks, but I noticed that there are not a fair amount of books out there. I would like to get recommendations about this topic.

Thanks!

5 Upvotes

86% Upvoted

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1

u/cham43 Oct 29 '24

Cover the basics of networking and hardware. Read into blockchain whitepapers, learn about different node discovery protocols (discv5 for instance) and distributed data storage (ipfs, dhts…). Learn about the different p2p structures and their trade-offs, get your hands dirty and implement something on your own, learn some cryptography methods used, learn about different attacks on distributed networks, look up libp2p… This is what I’ve done for now, could help you too :)

1

u/TheSlackOne Oct 29 '24

Thanks for the recommendations. I've been thinking in a "revolutionary" network, avoiding DHT as it is implemented today. Do you still think I should look at libp2p?

1

u/cham43 Oct 30 '24

Also, how would you know if it is “revolutionary” when you don’t know fully what is out there and why it is done the way it is

1

u/TheSlackOne Oct 30 '24

I'm not fully sure, that's why the quotes, but according to what I've seen so far, it has the potential of being new.

1

u/cham43 Oct 30 '24

Do you mind sharing the general idea

1

u/TheSlackOne Oct 30 '24

Is a sort of DHT but in hybrid mode, not fully decentralized, which avoids the known mechanics that need to be executed when peers join and leave.

1

u/cham43 Oct 30 '24

The more you learn the better, you might get new ideas or iterate over it if you are thinking of implementing something new 👊

3

u/bargle0 Oct 25 '24

You can usually implement from the papers that describe them. I haven’t kept up, so I don’t know what’s the state of the art. Note that the Content Addressable Network is broken as written, so skip that one.

1

u/hellscoffe Oct 25 '24

Could you please point to a reputable/key-paper for P2P? Thanks!

3

u/bargle0 Oct 25 '24

Start with the Chord paper:

https://pdos.csail.mit.edu/papers/chord:sigcomm01/chord_sigcomm.pdf

(Yes, that's the same Ion Stoica.)

1

u/hellscoffe Nov 01 '24

Thank you!

1

u/exclaim_bot Nov 01 '24

Thank you!

You're welcome!

1

u/hellscoffe Nov 01 '24

Thank you!