Will Morton wrote: > On 18 June 2010 01:45, David Barrett <dbarr...@quinthar.com> wrote: >> I wonder if it could get even higher >> seeder ratios purely through leveraging community generosity, without >> bothering with all the complexity of a byte currency? > > The purpose of the currency in robonobo is not to enforce > seeder:leecher ratios, but rather to allocate bandwidth within the > swarm.
I think that somewhat makes sense, but I wonder if most of the same effect could be had by simply having the application built to voluntarily download slower if there are other swarm members that claim they want streaming performance? Granted, if the swarm has a high seeder:leecher ratio (which it should be if the content is popular), then probably everybody can download as fast as possible and none of this matters. But in the period where a piece of content has a low seeder:leecher ratio, then have clients broadcast their intent. If everybody in the swarm is just trying to download as fast as possible, then everybody just does that -- maybe letting tit-for-tat step in to regulate things (though I wonder if that's even really necessary). However, if someone wants to stream *and* if it's finding that it can't stream due to not having a sufficient download rate, it could just broadcast "hey dudes, I want to stream but I can't, can you help a brother out and slow down your download to free up capacity?" This would be totally unenforced, but it might just do the trick well enough. After all, this isn't 1990 anymore: most pirates aren't l33t hackers and don't really understand the details under the hood and won't really tweak out their client to game the system. If the defaults are set to be pro-community, most people won't bother to change them. Of course again, I wonder if too much emphasis is placed on efficiently allocating scarce capacity overall. Instead, the focus should be on getting more capacity by encouraging high seeder:leecher ratios. Whoever does *that* best wins. And doing that probably has everything to do with appealing to pirate psychology, and little to do with technology. -david _______________________________________________ p2p-hackers mailing list p2p-hackers@lists.zooko.com http://lists.zooko.com/mailman/listinfo/p2p-hackers
