some service nodes will generate less income for doing the same amount of work at the same expense
That's a creditable starting point. Before we kick off ...
I dunno if everyone's cued in to the fact that the discussion is actually about the management of an
overlay network “An overlay network is a computer network, which is built on the top of another network” The idea's been around since forever, there's a literature corpus to be mined for algorithmic insights and a broad appreciation of a range of issues, e.g. Stanford's work on RON (Resilient Overlay Networks), now 15 years old. For a more recent overview of the domain, see “Overlay Networks: Overview, Applications and Challenges” by Galán-Jiménez and Gazo-Cervero in IJCSNS International Journal of Computer Science and Network Security, VOL.10 No.12, December 2010, full paper (PDF):
http://paper.ijcsns.org/07_book/201012/20101206.pdfAnother pertinent domain is MANET (Mobile Ad-hoc NETworks) -
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mobile_ad_hoc_network for which threshold cryptography is also a key component.
Lastly, looking into the near future (at least 6 months) there's the exotica that may become mundanely relevant as the overlay network application space expands, e.g. Raftopoulou, Petrakis and Tryfonopoulos’ “Rewiring Strategies for Semantic Overlay Networks”:
Semantic overlay networks cluster peers that are semantically, thematically or socially close into groups, by means of a rewiring procedure that is periodically executed by each peer. This procedure establishes new connections to similar peers and disregards connections to peers that are dissimilar. Retrieval effectiveness is then improved by exploiting this information at query time (as queries may address clusters of similar peers).
http://users.uop.gr/~praftop/papers/pdf/dapd09-RPT.pdf <- DAPD = “Distributed and Parallel Databases”
Back to “fair” - inverting, to negate the negation and make explicit the assumption, “the same task”:
the same task, the same income, the same amount of work, the same expense == fairHave to rule out “the same expense” because it's incalculable in the large: it varies according local energy market conditions.
Have to rule out “the same amount of work” because it too is incalculable in the large because it varies with machine cost/performance.
So we're left with the only thing we can actually calculate: “the same task”, “the same amount of income” == fair.
That's quite egalitarian in principle and, to a degree, viable precisely because it acknowledges that variations in local conditions prevent real costs being compared, so in practice the coin is reduced to necessarily adopting a
policy of simplification of modelling the cost of membership of the overlay network.
But I think that's where Mr Spread's approach has the edge. By presenting it as an auction, it enables participants' bids to reflect the locally-dependent calculations we cannot make in the large. According to our necessarily narrow definition, it cannot actually be described as less fair/egalitarian but it will certainly be more sustainable in the long term because it better reflects the
actual cost of maintaining the overlay network.
Just to muddy the waters further, atm I don't see why there should always be one and only one logical overlay network. I can foresee different logical overlay networks supporting different applications offering different cost/benefit tradeoffs and levels of income, so I'd like to see the overlay network membership cost eventually pushed into the specific overlay application rather than resting on a relatively coarse and insensitive assumption that it's a single amount applicable to all overlays irrespective of differences in the complexity/magnitude of the service provided.
IIRC (I did read it
very quickly) there's some reference to characterisations of differences in node capability / connectivity in the overview ref (above) which will be grist to practical discussions of these overlay network parameters.
My sense (as essentially, an outsider) is that Spreadcoin can't afford to be perceived as endorsing/enabling the kind of cynical insider profiteering that Crave seems to have attracted:
it is still good money to make watching tv and picking your nose.
That's
really going to impress business clients seeking to make use of Spreadcoin's overlay network applications.
Cheers
Graham