On 23 Mar 2002 at 9:26, Anonymous wrote:
> Also, you have not distinguished clearly one of the main differences > between the Napster-type file sharing networks and what you are calling > storage-surface networks (what does "surface" mean here anyway?). > The difference is that in the latter you have to explicitly inject the > data to be stored, while the file sharing networks allow you to implicitly > share the data you already have. > I think there's something sort of backwards here. Distributed publishing requires nodes to be willing to host data that they have no particular interest in, and generally no direct access to. There's no difficulty in principle in automatically injecting data, writing a routine that goes through a subdirectory structure and publishes all the files would be pretty trivial. The problem is that you'd only get metadata if people go to the trouble to write it up, but you get the same problem with shared files. Thinking about this, there's no particular reason why the same newtork couldn't incorporate elements of both. That is, if I have the equivalent of a mojo nation block server on my machine, and also have a shared director with whatever in it, there's no reason my mojo nation server shouldn't be able to look in my shared directory, check the hashes of the files there and compare them with data from a publication tracker, and tell the publication tracker that I can serve blocks from any of those files. > Not all of these are still going but it shows that there is a lot more in > the P2P file sharing and publishing world than just a few moldering old > cypherpunk projects from the 90s. P2P has really passed the cypherpunk > world by. > > As far as the economics, one of the main lessons of the failure of Mojo > Nation was that Mojo didn't work, or perhaps you might say it worked too > well. It caused nothing but problems for the operators of the network. > People tried to horde it, they got upset when they were losing Mojo, > they would cheat and steal to get more. MN steadily downplayed the > importance of Mojo over the life of the project, making it harder to see > how much you had, decreasing its importance in terms of getting data, etc. > Eventually it was practically invisible. > There were two problems with the "mojo" aspect of mojo nation, either of which would prove fatal to the concept as envisioned: 1) Running a mojo server and doing nothing would in general cost mojo rather than acumulating mojo and 2) Accumulating mojo wasn'r worth anything. > The lesson? Something may be needed to protect against DoS and similar > attacks, but it's not payment. Look at how successful Napster-style > file sharing networks have been, despite predictions of parasitism since > there is no economic reward for sharing. > Your conclusion may or may not be true, but it certainly isn't proven by mojo nation. > Unfortunately many of the programmer types who have been pushing P2P > development also happen to be libertarians. Their sad faith in that > ancient religion prevents them from learning from experience. They see > everything through the distorting prism of their ideology. If people > are going to learn from the successes and failures of the past, they > must have clear vision and the courage to look beyond the circumscribed > boundaries imposed by their political beliefs. > I think you're confusing actual libertarians with ignorant strawman stereotypes of libertarians, but whatever. George
