What advantage does Freenet have over Gnutella?
Freenet and Gnutella share only two things: They’re both peer-to-peer, and they’re both decentralized. That’s where the similarities stop. Freenet is a very powerful peer-to-peer platform. The reason it’s so powerful is that it takes data onto the network, it migrates the data toward demand and it mirrors that data so that it enables high-bandwidth data to move efficiently through the system. Here’s the picture: With Gnutella, if someone wants something they go out into the middle of the street and they say, “Does anyone have Britney Spears,” or “Does anyone have X document?” And if 1,000 people have it, 1,000 people are going to shout back and it’s going to get really noisy. And when 1,000 people send it to you, they’ll clog the network. With Freenet, someone says, “Hey, does anybody have it?” and the information is sent to that person once. So, for instance, let’s say there is a request for information “A” in London — a music file or a piece of financial information — and that info
