dhts

For a simpler model, if you don't want to wade into consistent hashing and DHTs, there's also IPv6 Cryptographically-Generated Addresses[1].

DHTs only work when they are centralized and are susceptible to a number of different attacks when operated with general public access.

DHTs work by sharding the key space AND routing state across their participants.

Please look at I2P for an example of the kind of architecture that would work well: two DHTs with decoupled garlic routing in between?

Bittorrent isn't going away anytime soon, and DHTs are here to stay.

DHTs can deal with a few nodes joining and leaving, but if lots of nodes become offline in one moment, you might face a problem.

I was going to write more articles explaining DHTs in more detail, but I can at least write here a short answer.

Maybe have multiple different DHTs that the scanner will try.

Neither Bittorrent, Freenet, nor DHTs of any sort satisfy the conditions of being public, having equal access read and write privileges and data that is always available.

The susceptibility of the DHTs to resource-starvation attacks.

But the cryptographic scarcity and consensus of Bitcoin may be just the thing to solve certain longstanding issues with DHTs, by increasing the cost of Sybil and DoS attacks.

As an example, I once saw a patent on sale that was a precursor to DHTs and could potentially read on systems like Amazon Dynamo.

The Vuze folks implemented Sybil attack defenses after our predecessor to this paper, "Defeating Vanish with low-cost Sybil attacks against large DHTs", was released.

"Crawling BitTorrent DHTs for Fun and Profit" (2010) says "We find that we can establish a search engine with over one million torrents in under two hours using a single desktop PC".