It is noteworthy that, given an arbitrary system, the user is a typical parent system or a default peer system to the given system in the environment.
The deeper question though is whether such peer-to-peer systems erode wages and worker rights even while they create jobs.
Other peer-to-peer systems which allow sharing of music files, such as Gnutella, will be harder to sue or shut down than MP3.com and Napster.
Tens of millions of people have used peer-to-peer systems, which account for more than half of all internet traffic.
But in April, a federal judge in Los Angeles ruled that two peer-to-peer systems, Morpheus and Grokster, were legal even though people used them to make illegal copies of music and movies.
But in addition to safeguards like preauthorizing the price of rentals through PayPal, the latest wave of peer-to-peer systems make use of social networks like Facebook and Twitter to engender trust.
Techno-utopianists of a libertarian bent think this vision is a confused botch, and that the purpose of the internet is to provide decentralised autonomous peer-to-peer systems that can replace government, not empower it.
Given all the internet sleuthing that has gone on, it's unlikely that a duo or group could have kept secret for this long how they devised the cryptographic protocols, peer-to-peer systems, and economic model that underlies Bitcoin.
But I was saying, well, yes, OK – but unless implementation of peer-to-peer systems in schools goes alongside a significant improvement in funding for Camhs (Child and Adolescent Mental Health Services), what you're actually doing is taking away medical support for mental illnesses, and then asking children to look after themselves.
Yet, just as in the same way that paedophiles reacted to Operation Ore - when they were largely caught because they gave their credit card details so as to be able to access child pornographic websites by instead using net-enabled mobile phones and peer-to-peer systems - so too, the determined paedophile would neatly circumvent any scheme that simply required police registration.
