Shawn Fanning wrote Napster, the world's first peer-to-peer application, so that students in his dorm could share music with each other. Ever since then, P2P file sharing has remained the killer application for digital music. First, to be fair, Napster is not a true P2P network. It uses a centralized server, which acts as a sort of air-traffic controller for the network. A true P2P network functions just like the brain. Its network of nodes doesn't need a centralized server to help make connections between the nodes. Instead, the nodes connect to each other autonomously, based on a set of rules that encourage the most efficient possible dissemination of data within the network. Just because this architecture has made inroads in the area of music sharing doesn't mean that it can't be used for all kinds of other things. I've come up with a few wild and crazy ideas of my own for using peer-to-peer technology to replace everything from our electricity grid to the bank system. While some of these schemes are more plausible than others, they all demonstrate how powerful the concept of P2P really is. Shockingly, all of these ideas are (gasp) very, very communistic in nature, which might say something about where technology's taking us.

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