A better way to promote sharing

**flowerchic** · 10-15-2010, 06:01 AM

As many people are posting, and studies are finding, most gnutella users are freeloaders. I have to admit, I am one too. (Hey, I'm an economist, they taught me to do it in college...) It shouldn't be a surprise to anyone since there are no personal incentives for sharing but there is the penalty of bandwidth and computer resources. This is the externality that is killing the gnutella network.

The current ways of promoting sharing such as requiring one shared file or limiting download bandwidth as a percent of upload bandwidth are not working and were not very well thought out ideas to begin with. We need to unleash some economics on gnutella.

I have a proposal to the gnutella standard to promote and maintain efficient sharing.

Make it a

**Mr.Wise** · 10-15-2010, 08:33 PM

Wouldn't work.

What's to stop anyone from putting together 100 10MB files of random bytes and sharing them? According to your post this could potentially give them unlimited access although they are essentially sharing nothing.

If you worked on the useful aspect then this would penalize people sharing the less well known files. Just because Bob is a Thomas Tallis aficionado and has all of Mr Tasllis's fine works of choral work ready for sharing, according to you idea he would get very little bandwidth because very few (if any) people would want to download form him.

In addition, the protocol is open for anyone to create a client against. For example, the number of files and total size is simply a single response returned as part of the PING message. Therefore any client can theoretically falsify the figure.

The issue of freeloading is a difficult one, but probably difficult, if not impossible to enforce because of the very nature of P2P.

Rachel

**JRY** · 10-16-2010, 06:32 AM

You didn't read it correctly. Read it again.

10 100MB random files wouldn't get the tenure rating since none of them are "useful". People need to want them. Also, how the hell do you make random 100 MB files anyway? By grouping useful files together? Silly....

People that share useless files aren't helping and so they can't be awarded bandwidth. Less known files are just fine. They just need to be known by 1 other user. If they are completely unknown, what good are they to the network and why does that person deserve bandwidth again?

critic