[p2p-hackers] p2p in some place or other

[Michael Rogers]

Alen Peacock wrote:
>   External motivation is good, but is it sufficient to provide some
> sort of equilibria?  If not, it's just the prisoner's dilemma; the
> vast majority of nodes disable caching because it is locally optimal,
> regardless of the fact that this produces a globally non-optimal
> solution.

Then how about internal motivation: the faster you upload, the faster 
you can download, and the more files you share, the more likely you are 
to be able to upload. I've come up with a half-baked incentive mechanism 
for Gnutella based on these principles:

http://www.cs.ucl.ac.uk/staff/M.Rogers/gnutella-incentives.html

No identity mechanism required I'm afraid ;-)

>   But, isn't it more interesting to think about building systems that
> have some fairness guarantees than building ones that don't?

Define fairness :-) I'm more interested in mutual benefit.

Cheers,
Michael