Nexus P2P trust network

This is a preliminary draft description of the Nexus P2P trust network.

After a long search for an easily deploy-able existing solution, I did not find one and so began developing one. So far, I am the only developer working on it. I'm about half-way through.

Design goals

Hardware configuration

Operates on a swarm of networked personal computers, like existing file-sharing networks. Minimal or no corporate server involvement. The heart of the system is a Kademlia-like network. There is an unavoidable trade-off of speed vs. privacy and immunity from control. I opted for the later, but will try to optimize speed.

License

Free and open software. I'm not familiar with licenses, but am leaning toward GPL2. Could use some advice.

Software platform

Should be as universal as possible. Considered a Firefox browser add-on, but went with Java because of the availability of the UDP data protocol and many other advantages.

Functionality

Functionality limited to searching for and evaluating the reputation of individuals or communities. Usable from a GUI or XML-RPC interface.

Status

The heart of Nexus is a Kademlia-like distributed P2P network and is awaiting large scale testing. Data can be stored and retrieved from it. One or more layers will be built on top of it to complete the functionality.

I would like to set this up for community development once a license is chosen and if anyone else wants to help.

Matrixpoint 12:42, 20 October 2009 (UTC)

Questions

Yeah, things are moving!

Some questions I have:

Where do you want to store member profiles? Will there be redundant copies on different machines, or will it all be on one machine?
What about people switching off their home computers - will that disrupt anything?
How does a search work? Where do you want to store the search index?
Basically, I would like to see answered all the questions I posted on Decentralized networks. Each time when I thought myself about decentralized networks, it was these questions that stopped me.

Thanks! --78.48.66.50 22:17, 20 October 2009 (UTC)