I'm still unclear on the problem such a system is trying to solve. What is this nebulous class of content that is important enough to share -- and that others conceivably want -- but that ISN'T so important that it's worth backing up in an inexpensive but reliable manner (eg DropBox), and ISN'T so illegal that you're worried about getting caught?
-david -- Sent from my Palm Pre On Aug 26, 2011 3:03 PM, Sean Lynch <se...@literati.org> wrote: On Wed, Aug 24, 2011 at 12:56 AM, Volodya <volo...@whengendarmesleeps.org> wrote: I think that your argument is 100% valid and sound. It is (with a single exception) impossible to have both 1) Guarantee that the content that you wish to distribute will remain visible after you go offline and 2) Guarantee that you store only content that you are "interested in". (The exception i am mentioning comes from some sort of mandate that all the nodes/computers remain online all the time, which is unrealistic and undesirable for ecological reasons). At least some of the content will be interesting only to the people who appear online after you go offline. And if you refer to the "whole of the humanity" that segment will become larger as you are talking about different time-zones and thus patterns of online activity. Well, fortunately, real world p2p systems generally don't have to offer guarantees of any kind, unless you want to offer services like backup that are probably better provided for pay by commercial providers with SLAs. All that really has to happen is that your data "usually" remains available. If you store content you're interested in, this actually provides a fairly good property: a piece of content's availability is proportional to its popularity. This is, in fact, how content distribution works in the real world. I think it's OK to also store content your friends are interested in to improve availability, but I'm standing firm on my claim that requiring people to store content they don't care about, at least a large amount of it (versus, say, a DHT that only has metadata, which people are obviously willing to do because it's how Bittorrent works nowadays), is a dealbreaker. It's possible to create complex schemes that attempt to work around this problem ala mnet, but then the complexity of the system becomes your dealbreaker.
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