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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