What is being paid for? Are we: 1) talking about a system to pay people for publishing content, the way a lot of sites put up paypal buttons for donations or paid access to special features, or 2) paying people for running nodes?
#1 is just anonymous, distributed digital cash, which I think is an unsolved problem. #2 is easier since you only have to pay your neighbors and there's no need for anonymity. One stab at a way of doing it would be to have a quoted price for a successful request of a given htl--running a properly operating node would be profitable under that system because you would pay the next hop the slightly lower cost for a request with one lower htl, and occasionally you'd have the data already in your datastore and could keep the whole fee for yourself by serving it locally. I'm not entirely sure this is a good idea, but it seems like the only hard part is how to transfer money between random people... they wouldn't need to be micropayments, since you could settle accounts on a monthly or whatever basis... -- Benjamin Coates >From "u Uler" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> >I'm no core developer, but I do have an option on micropayments. I think >they'd be a great way to raise revenue, and they might help move Freenet >development forward a little bit. Also, I'd be willing to pay something >(aka, donate) and I'm thinking about doing so. However, not everybody has a >lot of money to spare, and I think that the contributions people are giving >that don't include money are already doing a great service for Freenet. [...] >I think that money would make more people want to run a node, but I think it >would make less people want to use the network. And I'm not sure that >micropayments are necessary for the network to actually work. > >> I was going to ask if there was a general consensus among the developers >> regarding adding micropayments to freenet. Good idea? Bad Idea? >> Since I >> can't ask there, I'll toss it out here and move it to tech later. >> _______________________________________________ Tech mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://hawk.freenetproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/tech
