General P2P file-sharing systems have been ubiquitous throughout the Internet since the mid-1990s. While such systems were made famous — or infamous — by the likes of Napster, the common thread with those systems was the general architecture. P2P systems consist of a distributed network architecture that requires participants to make a portion of their computer system resources, such as processing power, disk storage or network bandwidth, directly available to other network participants without the need for a central server or host to oversee the exchange.

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