Peer-to-Peer Network

A peer-to-peer network, or P2P network, is one in which participants connect directly to each other as equals instead of routing everything through a central server. In crypto, nodes use a peer-to-peer protocol to gossip transactions and blocks: the transaction your wallet broadcasts is passed from neighbour to neighbour until it reaches miners or validators anywhere in the world. There is no single address to shut down and no operator to ask permission from, which is a large part of why the ledger is hard to censor. The trade-off is that peers are untrusted by default, so every node verifies what it receives rather than believing it. If a wallet connects through only one provider's node, it inherits that provider's view of the network.