On Tue, Aug 23, 2011 at 5:40 AM, Ian G <i...@iang.org> wrote: > Yes, I understood your point. But I would suggest it is correlation not > causality. > > 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. > > Now, whether this assists or breaks your app is ... open to question. It > works for e.g., Skype & TOR, which consumes resources from one person to > allow a service to another, without any clear accounting. But it doesn't > work to the extent that when I notice my laptop heating up or my bandwidth > draining over phone, I turn Skype off!
I understand the concern here, that by running a service without tit-for-tat accountability you don't feel a need to constantly run it and will perhaps turn it off when it's most in demand. I'd suggest that such a system (e.g. Skype) has failed to properly motivate you to keep it on. Obviously Skype is just leeching off your connection if it promotes you to a Supernode and there's absolutely no clear incentive for you to remain connected at that point. > When you don't have any guarantees of SLA when you "purchase" things >> with some virtual currency, what is it actually worth? >> > > (SLA isn't an expression of value. It's just a feature demanded by some > very large corps that can't cope with unreliability in non-core business. > Reputation + best-efforts is far better than SLA+bigger price, IMHO.) I was using SLA interchangeably with availability here, mea culpa. My point was if you are trading some virtual currency for hosting content on other nodes, that exchange should come with some basic guarantees about its availability. I don't think this is realistic to enforce and because of that I'm very much soured on the idea of virtual currency. > I think a better >> approach is to cryptographically log the behavior of various >> participants in the system in order to automatically make judgments >> about them and how reliable you expect them to be. >> > > This works on paper, but most reputation systems so far have been > worthless. Where, worthless means, didn't deliver enough value to justify > the work put in to collect the info... I would very much argue the very opposite. Can you cite systems which use a virtual currency that have been effective? Is there anyone here who wouldn't look to MojoNation in and of itself as a complete failure? I can't think of any currency-based p2p system that works in the wild, whereas BitTorrent communities are entirely based on reputation. I've been a participant in a number of BitTorrent communities and I can tell you they entirely operate by reputation. I don't want to get into the nitty gritty of things, but some private BitTorrent trackers want to see what other private trackers you've been on, a current snapshot of your current torrent client, what your ratios are, how the other sites rate you as far as your ratio goes, etc etc (If you'd like to talk offline about various private BitTorrent trackers I can certainly cite examples). I think reputation could be cryptographically formalized in the form of per-client "long chains" which provide a web of trust as to your participation in the network as a whole over time. I think the whole ceremony of trying to prove to a particular private tracker network that you are trustworthy can be formalized. I've also notice that, upon joining one of these communities, the first thing I do is download some popular content I'm not necessarily interested in, not at all because I want to see it, but because it's popular and because it's popular it can boost my site-specific ratio by downloading and serving content which is popular within that site-specific community. I'd like a system where this process be automated, so that if I'm willing to serve other users content to further my reputation as a willing participant in the network I can trade my bandwidth for other nodes signing my personal "block chain" and thus boosting my credibility. -- Tony Arcieri
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