Ah, ok. I think Bitcoin would serve the purpose much better! I think this true, not necessarily because of anything inherent to the currency, but because of the accumulated experience in the Bitcoin community regarding just how determined some people will be to cheat the system. The market model must have strong incentives for good behavior and robust methods of detecting and deterring bad behavior because there will be bad actors. |
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Until this kind of thing itself alone without graft/bribery using an external currency works smoothly, I think adding graft/bribery is probably just going to make it even harder to get it "right".
Rabid free-market folk I suppose would say look if someone offers more money for deleting all data that originated from you than you offer for retaining it, tough luck, man up and offer bigger bribes.
I wonder how much those people are offering not to have them shot on sight? Is this a conversation about how a system could be devised to efficiently allocate excess bandwidth and storage space or it is a conversation about emotional issues that you should be talking to your therapist about? |
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Yes, but by other currencies I meant currencies such as megabit-hours of storage, megabit per second seconds of bandwidth, persistence of reachability at any hour of the day or night, still having your data next year when you need it, not flying by night with all your data, not conspiring to try to DOS you somehow in your use of the system and on and on like that. That's why I mentioned reputation systems in a previous post. A laptop that is not connected to the internet constantly will frequently fail to deliver blocks so would have a very low reputation score. Its storage would then be devalued compared to nodes which were always on with a reliable and fast connection and probably wouldn't be able to generate much income at all. |
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https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafsOne of the developers (Zooko) is into bitcoin. Perhaps starting a discussion about this on the tahoe-dev list would be well received. There may be a way to easily integrate servers advertising a bitcoin address to encourage them to provide more space. He might not be able to participate, although this message from 2005 may be outdated. Dear mnet-devel and p2p-hackers:
I am about to accept an exciting job that will preclude me from
contributing to open source projects in the distributed file-system
space.
I will miss the Mnet project! Good luck without me! There are some interesting thoughts at the bottom of the message regarding digital cash and how it worked in the Mojo Nation project. V. Persistent Tit-for-Tat == Bilateral Accounting. Mnet v0.7+ lacks
something -- an incentive mechanism to limit excessive costs imposed on
the network and simultaneously to motivate users to contribute
resources to the network. I was always deeply impressed with the
simplicity and robustness of Bram Cohen's "Tit-for-tat" incentive
mechanism for BitTorrent. Suppose we wanted a similar "tit-for-tat"
mechanism for Mnet v0.7++, but we wanted the peer relationships to
extend through time and across multiple files and multiple user
operations. Then we would probably invent a bilateral accounting
scheme for each node to keep track of how much goodness each of its
peers has done for it, and to reward helpful peers. This would then
turn out to be more or less identical to the "bilateral accounting"
scheme that was originally invented by Jim McCoy and Doug Barnes in
Mojo Nation [footnote *].
[footnote *] Once upon a time there was digital cash, as pioneered by
David Chaum. When Jim McCoy and Doug Barnes invented Mojo Nation, they
used digital cash, and added bilateral accounting so that a pair of
peers wouldn't require a transaction with a central token server in
order to incentivize each other. The first three employees they hired
to implement Mojo Nation in 1999 were Greg Smith, Bram Cohen, and
myself. (Greg might have started in 1998 -- I'm not sure.) Several of
the ideas in BitTorrent -- which Bram started writing in 2001 -- can be
understood as radical simplifications of ideas in Mojo Nation. One
such perspective is to think of BitTorrent's tit-for-tat incentives as
being time-limited, file-specific, and non-transferrable bilateral
accounting. This is not condemnation of BitTorrent's ideas, but praise
of them -- they demonstrate the virtue of radical simplification. |
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What do you get if you multiply six by nine?
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But just because I am interested in bitcoin and indeed even devcoin and litecoin and on and on and on does not mean I want to part with my precious bitcoins for something I can instead buy with other currencies. How about some of the people who want to PROVIDE THE PENNIES make some concrete offers of how many pennies per what span of time they are willing to pay to have how many copies of how many bytes distributedly stored? Ok, you don't want to spend any of your precious bitcoins to rent storage space from other users. So what are you objecting to exactly? If you don't want to use this kind of system than all you have to do is not use it. Are you upset that other people might be willing to spend their bitcoins to buy storage? that other people would be willing to rent out their excess storage for bitcoins? Do you not want bitcoins to be used as a real currency that people regularly spend? |
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Actually I think what I am not seeing is what the barriers are to mass storage services such as Amazon S3 getting so cheap from so many suppliers that the original poster's complaint that offsite storage is too expensive ceases to be a real driver for this kind of project. The reason someone would choose a decentralized solution for online storage instead of a centralized solution is the same reason they would be interested in Bitcoin in the first place. |
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I guess what I am getting at here is that reliability and volume of storage and bandwidth usage are plenty of currencies already, in fact each could be adjusted separately so that for example if I provide vast amounts of storage for huge lengths of time but at low bandwidth, what I will tend to get in return is lots of space for plenty of time but at low bandwidth. If I want to spend general purpose currency of some kind to increase the speed, I can upgrade my own speed with that money, thereby resulting through reciprocity with my peers in better bandwidth for my own usage. I can buy more storage or more speed or more duration simply by buying it for/from my own site, no need to buy it from others' sites. Simple reciprocity will cause what I get from others to adjust in accordance with what I provision locally aka what I pay to/for my own site. I think the problem you're not seeing is called the double coincidence of wants. Not all users who need large amounts of storage have large amounts to share. A market mechanism is an efficient way to bring those with excess storage/bandwidth/uptime/CPU power together with those who need it. Why would you think that having different currencies for each scarce quantity is better than using a single currency? Would you want to use a different currencies to buy food with, pay rent, and procure transportation? |
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It seems overly complicated and off-purpose to go looking to sell people storage space on my site to raise funds with which I can then go looking for other sellers to buy storage from on their site. There's absolutely no reason at all that the user would ever be exposed to those details. Automated trading algorithms are fairly common so there's no reason for the user to need to configure any of it himself. Someone who is running a block server wants to collect a small income stream from his excess hard drive space. Due to competition it's not going to be a very large income stream but lots of people have excess storage and would enjoy being able to collect a few bitcents every day for it (whatever the market price happens to be). This user shouldn't need to do anything other than install the software and allocate drive space. The program should handle the details of getting the best possible price for his storage space without further intervention. Likewise the person storing data wants to pay as little as possible for a given amount of data, given amount of reliability and a given amount of bandwidth. His software should also take care of the details entirely behind the scenes. He should be able to upload data, choose a reliability and bandwidth targets and forget about it other than periodic reminders to add more Bitcoins to his node's wallet. There can a plethora of automated trading action going in behind the scenes, with contracts, escrow and reputation systems but that's all complexity that the user never needs to see or worry about. |
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I suspect that using an accounting token that has uses other than simply keeping everyone's usage within the bounds of their contribution will provide un-useful incentive to abuse, thus that it is preferable not to resort to such tokens unless it is mission-critical that people who do not use the service themselves provide the service. The incentives would need to be thought through carefully. If it was a simple matter of paying people to accept data then it would be attractive to scammers who would just throw your data into a bit bucket and take your Bitcoins. If it is intended to be a distributed alternative to DropBox based on the Mojo model the people offering storage space would need an incentive to keep their nodes online and connected, which means an income stream proportional to the amount data they are holding and their node's past performance. Block servers could all advertise a daily storage cost per block in an auction and the nodes seeking to upload data could send their blocks to the lowest bidder. Each day (or whatever time interval is used) before a node issues payment for block storage it should query a percentage of random blocks from each block server to verify that the block server actually has the data. If it fails to deliver the requested data the block server would first not get paid and second that information should be fed to a reputation system. If a user doesn't pay for storage it would be up to the block server to decide what to do. It could discard the data immediately, or it could retain it and demand back payments to release it, or most likely it would keep it until it was either paid for or until the block server ran out of space and unpaid blocks were overwritten by paying blocks. So in the end the user wanting to store data tells his node the maximum amount he is willing to pay per day to store his data and how much redundancy/reliability he wants and the node automatically tries to find the most cost effective solution based on the block servers which are advertising free space and their reputations. |
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Wow, well that sounds like the perfect thing to start from...
Given the leanings of the founder of that project it might even be possible to get the original creators on board. The idea was good but it was about a decade too early... |
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Property requires something called legal title to be useful. You can't raise a mortgage on a patch of land just by saying "A market entity will support me if I pay it" as someone else can pay a bigger "market entity" and take it off you.
A market requires enforcement of contracts. That means you needs courts and lawyers. If you rely on the free market, you will have competing courts giving alternative verdicts.
Absent a government, these problems get solved by a single "market entity" overpowering all the others so that only land title it recognises and only contracts it validates count.
That "market entity" is now a government - unelected; unrestrained and it will be a tyranny. Congrats!
You are confusing your own lack of imagination for a immutable law of nature. You can't figure out how property is useful without a government-granted title. You don't know how to interact with people or resolve interpersonal disputes without a government. That's fine - you're under no obligation to know or learn alternative ways to solve these problem but by stating these things as if you know them to be true you're just putting your own unexamined prejudices forward as fact. |
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Found it: Mojo NationIt was extensively covered on Slashdot in the 2000-2002 timeframe. When the company that was developing it started to run out of money they tried to take it commercial and turn it into a LAN backup product called Hive Cache. One of the developers forked it as Mnet but without the micropayments. The source for Mnet is still available so someone who was so inclined might be able to revive the project and incorporate Bitcoin. The original Mojo Nation code was LGPL and there are still copies of it floating around too. |
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Do you think Bitcoin would help it, uh, catch on easier? The project is dead now but from what I can remember the fundamental economic model was broken. You had to pay upload and to download and the only ways to earn currency was to donate hard drive space or run indexing and directory services. They never could figure out a good pricing mechanism that actually worked. It's been so long ago that I can't seem to find any reference to it and nobody I've asked can remember what it was called. |
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This has been done before, several years before Bitcoin was ever invented. I can't for the life of me remember the name of the program but it was an open source P2P network with its own virtual currency. Obviously it never caught on.
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I have had a few HNWIs and UHNWIs whose only reservation with moving $500k or $1m into BitCoin is the lack of liquidity and scalability of investment so they settle with puny amounts like $25k or $50k, etc.
In my opinion, there is huge pent up market demand for the type of utility BitCoin offers and the longer it stays around the more confidence it will garner resulting in more people allocating capital towards it.
When you talk about market demand and investment do you mean just buying up currency and speculating on price increases or do you mean investing in new businesses that actually produce something? |
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True. But people can't use them if they don't have them. I still think the number of people holding bitcoins right now is too small to support robust economic activity, and in order to get to that point more people will need to buy bitcoins. Unfortunately the kinds of people who are looking for a safe haven currency tend to be people who aren't going to spend them on products and services. |
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It's good that Bitcoin is getting attention but right now the currency needs businesses using it as a means of exchange more than it needs people buying up Bitcoins with their life savings.
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First, allow me to defend against polluting aggressors by either:
A. making it really easy to sue them, or That's actually how things worked in common law jurisdictions prior to the government getting involved in regulating environmental issues. During the early industrial revolution orchard owners in England were successfully suing factory owners for the air pollution they were creating until the government there passed a law exempting factories from liability for the property damage they caused. Factory owners paid more bribes to the politicians than the farmers so their needs were prioritized "for the greater good". |
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That's why I'm not angry you and mtgox are for the purpose of self preservation giving in to these threats of violence and following the state's rules. What makes me angry is not calling a spade a spade. Don't say you are obliged to comply, say you are forced under threat of violence, don't say money laundering, say state's arbitrary rules about money transactions, don't say terrorists, say organizations the state wants to destroy, ect. just cut out the bullshit state apologist propaganda and tell it like it is. I believe that you're angry but I'm skeptical that you're actually angry at Mt. Gox. Is their refusal to antagonize the regulators who barely even need an excuse to shut them down really the most egregious example of not calling a spade a spade that affects you on a daily basis? Could the actual source of your anger someone or something a little closer to home? |
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