Would you and your 7 friends be equally enthusiastic early adopters if the 9th member of your node was the RIAA/MPAA/etc?
In these digital inquisition times, where your entire net worth can be vaporized at a whim, how do you convince people that it's safe to share your data even if it has a normal amount of pirated content? (After all, everybody has *some*, and probably enough to trigger catastropic consequences if noticed by the right party.) So I agree with Michael that usability is far more important (and difficult) than technology. But when dealing with P2P, a healthy dose of recognition of the insanity of our times is more important than both. With this in mind, ask your testers to participate in a challenge: they use it as normal, but offer to pay $100/instance to anyone who can prove a given IP address pirated something -- a crowdsourced RIAA simulator. If there are no takers, try $1000. Once you've got it to a point when nobody can tell who has what (yet the system continues to work and provide real value), you're onto something that might get widespread appeal. If it's usable, that is. -david -- Sent from my Palm Pre On Aug 26, 2011 8:45 AM, Tony Arcieri <tony.arci...@gmail.com> wrote: On Fri, Aug 26, 2011 at 3:40 AM, Michael Rogers <m...@gmx.com> wrote: If you want to know what's actually standing in the way of a global p2p filesystem, try to persuade your technically minded friends to use Tahoe (or Freenet, or OceanStore, or CFS, or PAST, or FARSITE) for sharing files. Make a note of the problems they run into and solve them all. Repeat the process with your less technically minded friends. Once you've solved all their problems, open some champagne because you've achieved more than a decade's worth of p2p research. ;-) For what it's worth, I just convinced 8 of my friends to run a Tahoe node. We have a small grid going, which is what got me interested in this idea again. -- Tony Arcieri
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