The research i've been doing in P2P networks (due to my involvement in the
okopipi project) has shocked me. In file sharing, we're living in the STONE AGE. Yes, even with bittorrent (which depends on centralized servers, and there's practically no privacy. And anonymous bittorrent like mutorrent is closed source, who knows if they got a backdoor in there).
EDonkey uses MD4 for hashing, it depends on central servers, and has no anonymity at all. And without mentioning queue # 4892 for a popular file.
Unfortunately for filesharers, file sharing networks based on modern P2P architectures is very scarse. The supernodes / ultrapeers approach is obsolete, easy to disrupt both denial of service and eavesdropping attacks.
The future of P2P is
Overlay Networks.
From an architectural point of view, I would recommend the KAD p2p network, which bases its architecture on the relatively-new
kadelmia network (See
Technical paper on Kadlemia, 2002).
Even then, Kadelmia could be improved because it's based on a
Pastry network topology - compared to other topologies like
De Bruijn Graphs, proposed by
a recent paper in 2003.
And more research is being done dealing with
load balancing,
anonymity,
trust, reputation, etc.
As I said, current peer to peer networks are in the stone age. Someone needs to design a file sharing network based on the latest research, and publish it.
P2P networks are obsolete. (Score:5, Informative)