On 2012-05-14 6:01 PM, Daniel Reusche wrote:
This is why we are improving our blacklists and trust models. I think
BitTorrent is an ideal testing field for a karma based economy.
Bittorrent's notorious problem is that it does not remember anything
from one torrent to the next, and does not share graph or karma data
from on peer to the next, because managing shared graph data is tricky,
and managing shared karma data is a great deal trickier.
This results in lack of incentive to seed, with the result that the vast
majority of torrents are unseeded. Torrents die.
To fix this problem, people tend to form associations based on a
particular web site. The association rewards and penalizes people
according to their upload download ratio, which is the wrong metric.
The important metric is keeping approved torrents alive, the important
metric is storage availability rather than bandwidth, though bandwidth
matters also.
The association has a central point of failure, its website and its
operators, who come under pressure. One needs a distributed system that
gives people incentives to seed - that rewards people for providing
other people storage and availability.
Some design characteristics:
*. Peers are identified by a durable public key.
*. Peers interact with keys they do not trust, but expect protocol
conformance and prosocial behavior only from keys they trust. Peers
limit their exposure to non trusted keys so that they can suffer only
limited damage from non trusted keys deviating from protocol or
otherwise misbehaving.
*. Peers may not only trust Bob, but transitively everyone Bob trusts,
and everyone that those peers trust ... If this works, they increase
their transitive trust in Bob, if it fails they decrease their
transitive trust.
*. Prosocial behavior consists of conforming to protocol, storage
availability, with valuable, or at least demanded, stuff in storage and
accessible on demand, and paying ones bandwidth and storage debts.
Since networks are unreliable, perfect protocol conformity is never
expected or demanded, but the burden that one's deviations from protocol
place on other peers counts against one's karma.
Thus Bob performs the functions of the website in a bittorrent
association - thus every well behaved peer performs the function of the
website in a bittorrent association.
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