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Full Peer Again

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

Dave is referencing his Full Peer again.

I like the concept of peers being able to link and serve as each other’s cloud. To me this is true distributed computing. However, a “peer” that’s guaranteed to be up 24 hours a day isn’t a true peer — it becomes a server.

For a P2P cloud, you’re going to have to a mechanism that can distribute services among a group of peers so that a request on the service can match to whatever is the closest peer that’s accessible. If you push the services out to one statically defined machine, you have client/server — even if you want to call the server a “full peer”.

Dynamic redirection of service requests. Dynamic installation of small, lightweight services on a group of peers. A store and forward functionality that allows a peer to signal it’s going offline, or coming online. That’s P2P. That’s true P2P. And that’s exciting stuff.