ZeroNet: Decentralized P2P Websites
Almost all websites people visit are hosted on some specific server. Whenever a person accesses a website, he is sending requests to one or more of the servers hosting that site, and the servers in turn are sending him information that allow his web browser to reconstruct the site as he sees it. This can be likened to a directional graph, where the “server” node sends information to one or more “user” nodes at the user’s request. This means that the user is dependent on the integrity and accessibility of the server node; if the server is blocked, taken down, or otherwise compromised, then the user will no longer be able to access the site. Note that neither site blocking nor site take downs are a rare occurrence. Torrent sites, for example, are often subject to both; in some instances, law enforcement may even raid these torrent sites’ servers in order to completely take the websites down, such as the Swedish police raiding the Pirate Bay in 2006 or, more recently, the server hosts behind Kickass Torrents just earlier this July. These successes rely on compromising the users’ dependency on the integrity and accessibility of the servers.
ZeroNet usurps this dependency. Put simply, ZeroNet is an open source project that decentralizes website hosting. Instead of having complete websites stored on servers accessed on users’ requests, fragments of a website are stored by every user that visits the site, and the website as a whole is hosted across the distribution of all users who frequent it. This contrast is analogous to P2P torrents where instead of having a file hosted on some central server such as Megaupload, the file is hosted by all the users who have it. In terms of graphs, this is akin to completely removing both the directionality and server nodes of the graph; users can share with each other the pieces of the site that they have, and download from each other the pieces they don’t. Every user is both a client and a server. The more popular a website is, the larger the network representing it becomes, with more nodes and interconnections are between them. This renders popular sites exponentially more difficult to block than before, since any new user node simply has to form one connection to any one of the users currently in the graph in order to access the site. Taking down a website hosted by tens of thousands or even millions of users becomes an exercise in futility. Even the less popular sites become more resilient, as there is no longer a single point of failure in its servers.
For good or worse, ZeroNet has gained relatively little popularity, so it is very unlikely to see widespread use any time in the future.
Though ZeroNet has many other features, only the P2P webhosting aspect of it has been discussed here. For more information, see the links below.
zeronet.io/
zeronet.readthedocs.io/en/latest/faq/
torrentfreak.com/steal-show-s02e01-zeronet/