[p2p-hackers] p2p in some place or other

[Alen Peacock]

On 12/12/05, Greg Bildson <gbildson at limepeer.com> wrote:
> There are an infinite number of rare files so caching those without future
> knowledge about anyone's interest would be costly and infeasible.

  I'd add: what is the self-interested motivation for a node to agree
to cache the content in the first place?  If proactive caching were
turned on by default in my p2p filesharing client, don't I have a very
real incentive to turn this off in my own node to preserve bandwidth,
disk space, and perhaps limit any legal liability?  If the implemented
client doesn't have the option to turn this feature off, isn't there a
very real incentive to use a different client to get better
performance / less risk?

  The beauty of "a) Send the file only to the downloader" is that
self-interest is leveraged to get the downloader to share.  Is there
some incentive or mechanism to enforce fairness with proactive
caching?  If there is, then it seems like you've still got to overcome
Greg's argument against, which is similar to many of the arguments
made against pre-fetching in traditional caching literature: how do
you ensure that you prefetch the right content, especially when the
cost of prefetching the wrong content is very high?

  Alen

(Hoping I'm not re-hashing conversations you had over sushi -- posting anyway).