Whitepaper - Factom With Cover

The Factom Peer-to-Peer Network
Factom will have a peer-to-peer (P2P) network which accomplishes two goals: communication
and data preservation.
Factom Peer-to-Peer Communications
Factom will have a P2P network very similar to Bitcoin’s. It will consist of full nodes which have
all the Factom data. The full nodes create a mesh network which will flood fill valid data
throughout the network. The Federated servers would be full nodes, but not all full nodes are
Federated or Audit servers. This is very much like Bitcoin, where miners are full nodes, but not
all full nodes are miners. This will limit the ability to DDOS the Federated servers individually.
They can connect anywhere inside the network to acquire the data needed to build the data
structures. As the servers are coming to consensus and disseminate their signed data, they
would publish the data over the P2P network. The P2P flood filling also limits the ability of
Federated servers to censor based on IP addresses, since valid traffic is mixed together by the
nodes they connect to. It also helps to prevent censorship, since the Audit servers can see the
Entries which should be included in the Entry Blocks. The Audit servers have an incentive to
bring bad behavior to light, so they can be voted up to a Federated server.
Data Preservation and Dissemination
Factom data structures (Directory Blocks, Entry Blocks, Entries) are needed for Factom to be
useful. They are public and will be preserved in two places. The Federated and Audit servers
need to maintain this data to make correct decisions about adding new Entries. Since they have
this data, they can provide it as a service, as part of being a full node. There will also be partial
nodes, which share only part of the Factom dataset. The partial nodes could share only the data
which is relevant to their specific application. Peer discovery for the partial nodes is handled by
a Distributed Hash Table (DHT).
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