[p2p-hackers] p2p in some place or other

[Alen Peacock]

On 12/13/05, Michael Rogers <m.rogers at cs.ucl.ac.uk> wrote:
>
> 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 ;-)

  Neat ideas.  Like you, I'm a big believer in incentive-based decisions.

  I just peaked at your "Cooperation in Decentralized Networks" paper,
and I notice that you do require exchange of public keys,
authentication with those keys, and some sort of history of
reciprocation, no?  This is what I'm talking about when I say
'identity' and 'trust'.  Each node has to be able to positively
certify the identities of other nodes, and what you seem to be
building is essentially a trust system built on top of those strong
identities.  Without the ability to certify node identities, you'd
have a system that was very susceptible to imposter nodes leeching
resources (in the form of reciprocation) that they hadn't earned,
right?

  Perhaps I confused the issue by using the word 'identity,' which in
some circles is used only to talk about the concept of linking a
virtual presence to a meatspace entity.  That isn't what I intended. 
What I meant was exactly what you describe: use of assymetric keys to
establish and prove peer IDs, use of those IDs to learn something
about the behavior of other agents in the network, and use of that
knowledge to make appropriate incentive-based decisions.


> >   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.

  Well, I don't know if my semantics are standard, but the concept of
'fairness' I was thinking of was one that was purposely broad -- an
umbrella under which 'mutual benefit' is certainly an essential piece.

  Alen