Here is a proposal as to how Tahoe, or a fork thereof, might be made "get what you give"
Each agent issues currency representing the right to store data on its servers, and transport data to and from its servers. Each agent attempts to exchange its currency with other's currencies, attempting, like a bittorrent agent, to get the best deal, though with much longer memory than a bittorrent agent. Bittorrent agents only care about what a given IP number has done for them lately. The Tahoe agent would need to remember what a given public key has done for them over time, in order to assess what a currency is actually worth, how reliably it can be converted into actual storage or actual bandwidth, and whether that actual storage is apt to go away. If an agent has a diverse collection of currencies, it can then store and access the data tahoe style. When someone reads a file, the bandwidth costs may be charged against the entity reading, the entity publishing, or some combination thereof, according to the settings on that file. So *some* files can be read by non contributors, by agents that have no currency. _______________________________________________ p2p-hackers mailing list p2p-hackers@lists.zooko.com http://lists.zooko.com/mailman/listinfo/p2p-hackers