I am trying to wrap my head around a p2p network and I think I brainstormed an idea.
If I understand correctly there needs to be some nodes so they have a public ip and port forwarding so they can initiate a connection.
but lets say we have 10 nodes so all good.
why dont we use clients (there will be multiple clients accessing the network vs the nodes number)
to help the network?
image smartphone users, they dont need to have a node but with their client they can help the network with critical data. lets say there is a video that is watched by a thousand people (or even this would allow live streaming with low latency) if clients store chunks of that video it can be really easy on the network.
e.g.:
no need 10 nodes to serve 1000 clients of that video, but the 1000 clients cache/buffer/store frequent accessed content (the video)!!!
as the clients would not need to port forward cause there would be a node that would initiate the nat traversal and hole punching for the client to send the chunk of the video to another client!!!
thoughts on this?
p.s. I made some calculations. it doesnt make sense for the client to burn bandwidth (especially smartphones with some GB of 4G and 5G) but it could be worth it with opt in if they have unlimited WIFI or unlimited 4G-5G!
You kind of want to make nodes from the clients, but still call them clients. Cashing nodes for popular content are planned as far as I know, but later on, not as part of the network release.
Btw smartphones are problematic, not only because data limits (and even “unlimited” plans having limits), but also battery life. Moving large amounts of data drains battery fast and there is no way around it.
It would work on clients that are pluged in so most pc laptop nd smartphones that again are oluged in and
All os use wifi as unmetered unless its and hot spot or its flagged as metered and we can have opt in popop up on smartphones on 4g-5g that will ask the user if mobile data is unlimited and also have a limit that can be user set like use 1gb of data
Imagine 2.billion people all watching a safe app version of netflix tiktok youtube etc etc how many nodes are there gonna be? It would be unfeasible to have those nodes sending 2 billion MB per second
That way we can enable smartphones or even tablets and laptops/pc with low storage available to gain SNT
P.s. maybe the clients have a one to ten ratio of upload to download, you watch a 1gb video and forward 100mb of that video to others watching it the same time, thats how bittorrent works in my experience
Even small bits each second or so prevent the phone from entering deep sleep, killing the battery.
You would have a lot more than 10 nodes. Larger files get split into smaller chunks, that are then processed by the network individually, allowing for much greater scaling/load balancing.