On 8/23/11 5:39 PM, James A. Donald wrote:
> On 2011-08-23 10:40 PM, Ian G wrote:
>> The tit-for-tat comes from human behaviour, not from using a currency or
>> any other feature of a design. A currency just helps to allocate the
>> tits& tats more accurately, it isn't the cause of the behaviour.
>>
>> So, if you average things out with some sort of sharing / probability
>> approach, you just won't see the tit-for-tat or other human solutions so
>> clearly.
>>
>> Hence, abuse or inefficiency in allocation won't be seen.
>
> A currency enables us to allocate tits and tats with perfect precision.
> There might be some intermediate measure, less restrictive and precise
> that allocates tits and tats in a fashion that is probabilistically
> accurate enough over time at lower accounting costs.
On a related note, we published a paper this past year (to appear in
Transactions on Neworking "any time now") that characterized the
efficiency gap between bilateral exchange ("tit-for-tat") and
multilateral exchange in file-sharing systems like BitTorrent.
http://www.cs.princeton.edu/~mfreed/docs/bilateral-tr10.pdf
Multilateral exchange allows transitivity (A -> B -> C -> A), which may
be realized through currency as a stored, fungible medium. The
interesting thing is the theoretical analysis shows that under certain
scenarios, bilateral exchange is sufficient, while in others it has a
noticeable efficiency gap with multilateral exchange.
Of course, once you deal with currency as a stored value for p2p
systems, you need to deal either with variable prices, monetary policy,
or fiscal policy. There's a similar discussion around Krugman's
favorite parable:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capitol_Hill_Babysitting_Co-op
Stored value remains a hard problem for p2p systems (which tit-v-tat
systems somewhat avoid, but "UL/DL ratio" and reputation systems for
private trackers do not). We saw this problem of monetary policy issues
in MojoNation about a decade ago, as Zooko has written about.
--mike
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