On Fri, Aug 19, 2011 at 12:32 AM, Tony Arcieri <[email protected]>wrote:
There's a few things missing from Tahoe which I have seen endlessly
> discussed which would need to be added for it to fill this role. The first
> would be a way for peers to weight themselves in terms of their available
> storage capacity. Perhaps Tahoe could utilize a self-assigned weight score?
>
I'm guessing any filesystem that requires this sort of thing is going to
have trouble in the real world. Consistent hashing for actual data (vs
metadata) is probably a bad idea in a p2p network.
> The second would be a sort of "you get what you give" model when storing
> content. I think this plays out in two different ways: reading content and
> storing content. BitTorrent has done a good job of ensuring fair access to
> content in terms of uploaded content in exchange for downloaded content. In
> addition to that, I think this needs to apply to data storage too: in order
> to store data on the network, you must contribute storage space.
>
I've seen some papers on this sort of thing, and I think it's a good idea.
I'm not sure how well a single currency would work, but a web of trust with
signed claims ("this person has successfully sent me 100 megs of stuff I
asked for") might work really well.
> Mea culpa if I have overlooked guarantees Tahoe already provides in this
> regard, but I think if the technology held people in check, what's keeping
> it from hosting a large content archive which would scale to a globally
> massive nework?
>
> To bring things back around to the BitCoin analogy: if there were a
> compelling enough media archive available via a peer-to-peer system like
> Tahoe which enforced access to both content and storage capacity available
> on a get-what-you-give model, don't you think people would be willing to
> make available their excess bandwidth and storage capacity in order to gain
> access to it and also the ability to cryptographically store and anonymously
> distribute data?
>
I'm skeptical of any system that requires you to store data you're not
interested in. Bittorrent works so well precisely because its requirements
on the user are so low - just leave the app open for a while after you're
done downloading. A lot of people would do this anyway because they're not
sitting there staring at their computer while the download's going on.
Needing to leave a daemon running constantly will be a serious handicap
unless the user gets a significant benefit out of it, like it's their IM
client or something. Nobody does group chat well, so that might be an
interesting way to induce people to keep the program open. The ability to
get to your home computer remotely would be another possible hook.
I have thought pretty extensively about exactly this sort of system, and I'm
happy to share more detail if anyone is interested.
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