Todd Walton wrote:
But anyway, ensuring people aren't using more than they are giving
seems about as easy to do here as it is with BitTorrent. i.e. iffy
Don't confuse BitTorrent with a good distributed system ... ;)
BitTorrent has little incentive to get better about leeching because
quite a lot of people using it are more interested in *hiding*.
Leeching improvements would require more central control; voting
improvements; checking data, etc. Most BitTorrent users want *less*
central data stored about them, not more.
In addition, better fairness would require more bandwidth to the central
tracker. There is a tradeoff between how much extra bandwidth gets
eaten by leechers (borne by the swarm) vs. control (borne by the
individual tracker). Even basic data for a 10,000 individual swarm is
sufficiently high that people are complaining.
In addition, most of the private BitTorrent communities of which I am a
member are quite good about leeching. Leeching is as much a social
problem with social solutions as it is a technical problem. Banning the
occasional idiot by hand is more robust than a technical solution which
someone will eventually try to subvert.
-a
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