[p2p-hackers] part 2: proxying and introduction: the two fundamental operations of emergent networks

[Lucas Gonze]

In the early gnutella days you got an introduction by going to #gnutella on irc
and looking up IPs of people in the room, who were likely to be running the
software.  This way of bootstrapping a network based on personal connections was
primitive and slow but extremely robust.

> Peer-wise horizontal diversification is just one form of
> decentralization.  Another is vertical decentralization, in which
> a variety of modalities are used to obtain operational information,
> with rolling failover between them.  It is more time-consuming
> to implement a multimodal introduction mechanism, but it can
> make your system quite robust.  Pick a few: