At the moment the ideas behind BitCloud really need a lot more thought, but it is a great opportunity for Devs and Thinkers to get together and make something happen.


Proof of bandwidth

I would argue that you cannot make an analogy with Proof-of-Stake or Proof-of-work. Its more like "evidence" for Bandwidth. You as a node want to show the network that you really did provide 100mb worth of useful file transfers, and that you didn't lie and that you didn't just transfer to other nodes you also control.

I would like to see how you can achieve Network consensus about the level of contribution that a particular node made.

Moderation should be after-the fact

I might be a little confused with the concept. Each storage node can subscribe to a number of other nodes and choose to act as their mirrors?

So it seems like you are taking a 'Whitelisting' approach. A storage node will only store stuff that has been pre-approved by a moderator.

However, in the real world most people would want to encrypt their data and this should be encouraged. So this pre-approval process cannot work as the moderator will not have the decryption key.

So it would seem better to simply encourage the use of encryption for everything while allowing moderators to perform a best-effort bad-content-censorship-with-consent process.  Whenever the moderator sees a (file hash, crypto key) pair to be dodgy content, he can update a blacklist and push to his followers.

But it really would be extremely futile.

Risk of price fixing?

How does the network decide who gets paid what? How can the network encourage competition between nodes and establish a true market price for bandwidth?

If the network is always deciding the price, then this could be a problem and could be seen as price-fixing

Do the minimum

Don't try to solve the world's problems all in one go, just focus on the smallest possible core problem and solve it well.

Look at existing work and don't reinvent when not totally necessary

Try to build upon existing work instead of trying to reinvent the wheel. For example, do your nodes need network-level anonymity? Yes. Well this is out of the scope of your project, your nodes can operate over I2P or Tor, don't waste 10 months trying to do it yourselves.

Look at existing distributed data structures (Kademlia, Freenet / BitTorrent / Tahoe) and examine how one can incentivize participation. Don't try to design your own unless really necessary.


Read the literature

There is a lot of related work out there, build from it

Ah ok. And for the search?

Yes ok you are quite right about currency exchange  etc.

But the services topic is way too crowded.

Surely we could have a "I want a developer" or "I want a graphic designer" sub forum?

Exactly. And the fact that an authorized user can very simply create an unprotected copy of the digital media he is consuming.

For some software, however,piracy may become less of an issue as more and more of the services we depend on are actually running on the software/cloud provider's hardware. i.e. the user runs a lightweight client that interrogates an API running on some remote server.

For consumables - music - videos etc, it really is a lost cause and there is seriously nothing that can be possibly done apart from providing alternatives like deezer/netflix etc.

Wait 90 seconds between searches, have I been transported back to 1997?


or more annoyingly, "the last post from your IP was less than 360 seconds ago ..." 

The Services board is really incredibly noisy.

With 200+k members is there a way we can add some child boards to give it a little more focus?

Personally I would like to see a 'Developer recruitment' / 'Graphic design' board

But there are tons of others that would be useful to people .. Mining services ... investment opportunities ... currency exchange etc

Currently the services board is pretty unusable and the search feature is close to useless (wait 90seconds between searches, it is 2014 right? )

You are an audio producer, you have just got a brand new album and you want Bob to check it out. You don't want him filesharing it so you use your magic bitcoin protection system.

You give your copy protected MP3 file to Bob.

Bob runs your software which checks that he has the rights to play the audio. He does.

He records the audio and uploads the unprotected version to the internets. The next day 50 million people have it.

There is zero solution to get round this.

There is a frightening lack of common sense on display in this thread.

As soon as you give Bob your precious sequence of bytes, he can do whatever the hell he wants with it, including spending 5 minutes to remove whatever protection you put in place and putting the rest on the internets for everyone else to enjoy.

Come on guys, it really is not hard. DRM does not and can never work.

At some point the user will need to have the (music/video/software) in non-encrypted form so that his (ears/eyes/cpu) can consume it.

So please tell me how your magic will prevent someone copying an unprotected version of this and sharing it with 50 million other people?

It is quite frankly impossible.

Indeed, (un)fortunately there is nothing special in the Bitcoin protocol that will suddenly make DRM work.

As soon as you protect your creative work with your magic-bitcoin-drm,  I will remove it and stick the unprotected version on thepiratebay

Simples

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I would simply say NO

Someone who makes a Paypal payment can simply reverse it once the bitcoins have been transferred. There are no safeguards

Greetings!

Welcome

oh dear