At last year's Europython Holger Krekel gave a keynote called "The Return of Peer to Peer Computing". He described how developers, in light of the Snowden surveillance revelations, ought to learn about and build decentralized peer-to-peer systems with strong cryptography. This talk introduces, describes and demonstrates ideas, concepts and code that a group of Pythonistas have been working on since Holger's keynote.
We asked ourselves two questions: what are the fundamental elements / abstractions of a peer-to-peer application and, given a reasonable answer to the first question, what can we build? We will present work done so far, discuss the sorts of application that might be written and explore how peer-to-peer technology could be both attractive and viable from an economic point of view.
