On 23/08/11 2:37 PM, Tony Arcieri wrote:
> The point I was trying to make on the thread I started about a global
> distributed datastore is that I thought modeling the system in terms of
> probabilities is a better approach than trying to enforce a systemwide
> currency that gives exact tit-for-tat measurements.

Yes, I understood your point.  But I would suggest it is correlation not 
causality.

The tit-for-tat comes from human behaviour, not from using a currency or 
any other feature of a design.  A currency just helps to allocate the 
tits & tats more accurately, it isn't the cause of the behaviour.

So, if you average things out with some sort of sharing / probability 
approach, you just won't see the tit-for-tat or other human solutions so 
clearly.

Hence, abuse or inefficiency in allocation won't be seen.

Now, whether this assists or breaks your app is ... open to question. 
It works for e.g., Skype & TOR, which consumes resources from one person 
to allow a service to another, without any clear accounting.  But it 
doesn't work to the extent that when I notice my laptop heating up or my 
bandwidth draining over phone, I turn Skype off!


> When you don't have any guarantees of SLA when you "purchase" things
> with some virtual currency, what is it actually worth?

(SLA isn't an expression of value.  It's just a feature demanded by some 
very large corps that can't cope with unreliability in non-core 
business.  Reputation + best-efforts is far better than SLA+bigger 
price, IMHO.)

> I think a better
> approach is to cryptographically log the behavior of various
> participants in the system in order to automatically make judgments
> about them and how reliable you expect them to be.

This works on paper, but most reputation systems so far have been 
worthless.  Where, worthless means, didn't deliver enough value to 
justify the work put in to collect the info...

iang
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