Since the launch of Bitcoin in 2009, the development of blockchain technologies has seen a massive rise. Over the past 10 years we have seen the birth of such terms as “ecosystem”, “smart contracts”, “payment channels”, “lighting network” and others but to mention a few.
But, before moving the discussion into how those have developed over the past decade and what benefit they can (will) bring, let’s have a brief look at p2p solution and their development as a slightly separate entity altogether.
One might think that the birth of p2p was in 1999. When such an amazing, music download service, as Napster (yes, if you are anything older than 30, then you are probably walking down the memory lane as we speak) came to light. Napster, was developed by a university student and made a revolution in the p2p space. Users could download a free (!) program that searched through local disks of other peers, for music and files in the MP3 format, it was then, able to download these (free) directly from one another. In less than one year, Napster had over one million members (this was insane numbers, if you are a millennial reading this). Following the year after that, Metallica decided to end the party without “whisky in a jar” and filled a lawsuit against Napster. Eventually, after a huge success, it was shut down after legal problems (though its worth to mention, that it lacked any monetary incentive).
Well, if you thought that Napster was the beginning, then you are wrong. P2P technology starts its roots much earlier. In fact, it goes all the way back to ARPANET in 1969, a university network connecting at least 3 premises on its network and treating them as equal peers.
Then, there was USENET, which was developed in 1979 and saw the birth of spam. The idea was, that a UNIX machine could dial another, exchange a file, and then disconnect (one must take a bow for this one).
After a brief break, we are back in 1999, with Napster. Right to a year later, when Guntella introduced a new way of file sharing. One different, from that of relying on central indexing servers. Same year, Freenet, allows users to store encrypted snippets of files (welcome the new age of anonymity), connecting them only through a median (another computer). This design somewhat resembles the way routers exchange packets on the internet, without knowing information about them.
2001, not only saw the end of Napster, but it also saw, what today, some call the “light at the end of the tunnel”: bittorrent. This allowed peers to communicate directly over a TCP port. Although, it still relied on centralised tracking systems to record availability of files. Eventually, one client, Vuze, managed to move to a system that didn’t track peers, doing so, by implementing a distributed hash table. Ofcourse, other clients have also followed its footsteps.
Such design allowed for interdependent networks to be created for each separate torrent. From this point onwards the adoption of peer to peer networks kept growing at a staggering rate.
If we pause here for a second, and look at the picture as a whole, we see a development from a multi rank, server based model to a client based model, somewhat resembling the move from getting information from major newspapers to youtube and personal data sharing.
Basically, there was a graduate move from connecting a somewhat local network, to allowing this network to interchange files and then, eventually (with the development of the infrastructure), being less dependent of central servers and managing to connect to other peers directly. With that, developing along the way anonymity and independent networking.
Form here on we move into 2009: the blockchain era. This is a distributed ledger with a somewhat different purpose to distributed hash tables. The essential point of a blockchain was immutability, where each node is able to trace the record of a growing network and never to tamper with it. DHT, on the other hand, was meant to provide an efficient system over the network in order to divide data.
Of course, no one expected this to grow into the most important monetary protocol in history, sweeping on its way a whole bunch of things, like consensus mechanisms and other applicable values.
It is definitely worth to mention Namecoin, which came in 2011. It was the first blockchain that wasn’t created for the sake of money, but rather as a data registry protocol.
The development of the blockchain technology is a completely separate topic as such, but if it were to be looked at at a glance, we could try to map it out as something like a “technological layer”, that resembles a pyramid (from the perspective of one layer laying on top of another).
The first layer iss bitcoin itself, or as many call it “blockchain 1.0”. That allowed, as stated above for a decentralised exchange of data (and solved the double spending issue). Then, between 2011 - 2014, the era of the altcoins, that tried to apply the logic of the above to different applications. Mainly with financial use (although hiding that behind goodwill and other silly things like memes). That eventually paved the way for “blockchain 2.0” and the birth of smart contracts, that allowed for programmed behaviour of a chain and saw a massive rise of the ICO market a few years later.
More recently came “blockchain 3.0 and 4.0”, or the time of the protocols. Where peers are creating a whole lot more than just an altcoin. It allows for plenty of use cases, such as creating own applications, layers, side chains, distributed ledgers (other than those with the same architecture as a typical blockchain) with an own architecture, interoperability and so on.
If we lay it on top of each other we can see a technological “pyramid”: the shift from servers to clients (our core base), the rise of peer to peer networks and encrypting (development), a different implementation of the technology (BTC) and the development of bitcoin, forks (new brands being formed), smart contracts (a technological breakthrough), ICO’s and DAPP’s (development of services), the protocols (a general technological breakthrough, allowing for completely new implementations).
All this, goes to show, the development of what was once just a search through a central server that coordinated a network of peers, to a class of decentralised storage networks, incentivising the nodes to work in a coordinated manner. By continuing to build and to develop protocols, we can eventually move into a new, decentralised era of applications that will be able to lower distribution-related costs and (even) earn money for its users in a fair way, all, by working peer to peer.