<aside> 💡 Web3 is booming, and Arweave is becoming a popular infrastructure choice for developers. PermaDAO is a community where everyone can contribute to the Arweave ecosystem. It's a place to propose and tackle tasks related to Arweave, with the support and feedback of the entire community. Join PermaDAO and help shape Web3!
</aside>
Author: CAM @ Zee Prime Capital
Reviewer: Viya @ Contributor of PermaDAO
Storage is a critical part of any computing stack. Without this fundamental element, nothing is possible. Through the continued advancement of computational resources, a great deal of excess and underutilized storage has been created. Distributed Storage Networks (DSNs) offer a way to coordinate and utilize these latent resources and turn them into productive assets. These networks have the potential to bring the first real commerce vertical into Web 3 ecosystems.
The history of real Peer to Peer file sharing really began to hit the mainstream with the advent of Napster. While there were early methods of sharing files on the internet prior to this, the mainstream finally joined with the sharing of MP3 files that Napster brought. From this initial starting point, the distributed systems world exploded with activity. The centralization within Napster’s model (for indexing) made it easy to shut down given its legal transgressions, however, it laid the foundation for more robust methods of file sharing.
The Gnutella Protocol followed this trailblazing and had many different effective front-ends leveraging the network in different ways. As a more decentralized version of the Napstereqsue query network, it was much more robust to censorship. Even in its day, it experienced censorship. AOL had acquired the developing company Nullsoft, and quickly realized the potential, shutting distribution down almost immediately. However, it had already made it outside and was quickly reverse-engineered. Bearshare, Limewire, and Frostwire are likely the most notable of these front-end applications you may have encountered. Where it ultimately failed was the bandwidth requirements (a deeply limited resource at the time) combined with the lack of liveness and content guarantees.
Source: Zee Prime Capital
Remember this? If not do not worry, it has been reborn as an nft marketplace…
Source: Zee Prime Capital
What came next was BitTorrent. This presented a level-up due to the two-sided nature of the protocol and its ability to maintain Distributed Hash Tables (DHTs). DHTs are important because they serve as a decentralized version of a ledger which stores the locations of files and is available for lookup by other participating nodes in the network.