Peer-to-Peer is said to be the next era of the internet, enabling the development of highly efficient and scalable distributed applications. File sharing is a popular online activity carried out by millions of users every day, but file sharing applications face several challenges to uptake, including availability, freeloading and legality issues. This paper explores these challenges, and investigates the viability of a purely decentralized application based on a Distributed Hash Table. We look at Human Computer Interaction, user interface goals and end user perspectives in order to achieve usability. We conclude that it is viable to develop a lightweight application to facilitate file sharing and communication in a user-friendly way, without the restriction of connecting to a central server or registering an account.
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