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Internet Bandwidth to Become a Global Currency?
Posted by
ScuttleMonkey
on Wed Aug 29, 2007 04:11 PM
from the the-almighty-bit dept.
from the the-almighty-bit dept.
ClimateCrisis writes to tell us that internet bandwidth could become a global currency under a new model of e-commerce developed by researchers from Delft University of Technology, Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam and Harvard's School of Engineering and Applied Sciences. "The application, available for free download at http://TV.seas.harvard.edu, is an enhanced version of a program called Tribler, originally created by the Dutch collaborators to study video file sharing. 'Successful peer-to-peer systems rely on designing rules that promote fair sharing of resources amongst users. Thus, they are both efficient and powerful computational and economic systems,' David Parkes, John L. Loeb Associate Professor of the Natural Sciences at Harvard said. 'Peer-to-peer has received a bad rap, however, because of its frequent association with illegal music or software downloads.' The researchers were inspired to use a version of the Tribler video sharing software as a model for an e-commerce system because of such flexibility, speed, and reliability."
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Submission: Internet bandwidth to become a global currency by Anonymous Coward
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Doesn't make any sense... (Score:3, Insightful)
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Paying for uploads is the only way P2P can work (Score:5, Interesting)
So a commercial P2P-based video download service has only four options:
a. do nothing and let speeds suffer - which is not accceptable to consumers;
b. reduce the picture quality - which would not be competitive with YouTube (low quality but free) and next-generation DVDs (much better quality and not that expensive);
c. provide the missing 19 Mb/s at their own expense - which is not financially acceptable to the company;
d. find a way to force consumers to upload for 20 times as long as they download.
Since the consumer's upstream bandwidth is such a hot commodity (everyone wants to use it, but it's limited), the video download service cannot assume that it'll be able to make use of theoretical full upload speeds. Too bad, since its very profitability depends on consumers' share ratios.
So the only possible way to get decent quality and decent speeds at a decent cost is to pay uploaders for connections. That way, they will actively choose to allocate their upstream bandwidth to the company, instead of to a competitor. Of course, this implies that the protocol is robust enough to withstand the fraud attempts that are obviously going to happen.
Such a system also has the benefit of solving the ISP / net neutrality threat. If such a system allows ISPs to set up proxies for profit, they'll make sure consumers' get maximal speeds, instead of killing the quality of service and turning the store's customers away.
(This would be option c) outlined above, except the ISP is doing it.)
Warning, shameless plug ahead:
Coincidentally, my brother and I have developed a BitTorrent extension that does just that. We originally intended to go live in a few days, but hell, here goes:
http://developer.snowballnetworks.com [snowballnetworks.com]
Developers are welcome. And paid. Anonymous posting has been disabled, so drop us an email at developers TA snowballnetworks.com to get an account.
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Snowball (as our extension is called) is designed around a web site, since we considered that a commercial web site would want
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I am having flashbacks to the companies that promised to pay for idle CPU time on PCs; are any of them still around? Is your system actually cheaper than a conventional CDN? Will you accept liability if my ISP cuts me off because I used their service "too much"?
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Also, you're assuming that you'd be sucking from one straw and spitting right out the other. That is dumb. However, if you're a
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Think Value Storage. (Score:2)
You are a bandwidth sink... you're not part of a route to anywhere (for good reason). Any files sent to or "through" your house have to travel down your internet connection and then go right out the same line.
In a world of ends, one nowhere is as good as another.
The files sent to my house may indeed pass by my neighbors or you but not when they want them. You will have to give me something to make them available to you again. That something might be to store a little on your own. The combined bandwit
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As for re
Only if (Score:2)
FAIL (Score:3, Insightful)
See:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Money#Economic_chara
Inherently not a 'currency' (Score:5, Insightful)
Indeed. Bandwidth may be a commodity, for instance, but in no way can it be a 'currency'.
Mark Twain: "If you call a tail a leg, how many legs does a dog have? Four. Calling a tail a leg doesn't make it one."
The advantage of currency is that it allows getting past the inefficient mechanism of barter. Bandwidth can be bartered, but it can't be stored, for instance. Unused bandwidth is forever wasted. The only way to prevent it being wasted is for someone to use it.
Parent
Except money is just another commodity (Score:3, Insightful)
No, it works. Re:FAIL (Score:2)
One of the requirements of money is that it is standardised across the economy.
There is no such thing as a standard store of value because each person has their own tastes. All that is really required is that everyone knows that others think the thing has value, which is why sea shells, gold and other useless things will do.
There's some sophistry going on here in calling the thing of value, "bandwith". What actually has value is the thing conveyed. That invites all sorts of idiotic comment from copyr
bandwidth currency? (Score:4, Interesting)
Slightly OT: It always seemed ridiculous to me how people hoard metals underground waiting for global currency collapse, as if the they expect the demand for jewelry to go up a thousand-fold the day after world-wide economic apocalypse. Gold doesn't do anything but look kinda neat and conduct OK, you freaks! We spent all that effort mining the gold, and then we put 95% of it back underground intentionally!
Re:bandwidth currency? (Score:4, Insightful)
Yes, this is one of the reasons economists don't like a gold standard: you have to hold a lot of gold out of production, just to use as money. (The other major reasons are that it imposes gold's price volatility on the entire economy, and that it restricts liquidity.)
Now, if there is a genuine, catastrophic financial collapose, you are correct that gold will not immediately have value. People will be most concerned with necessitities, so canned food, pure water, farming/hunting equipment, and guns will probably be more likely currencies in the immediate wake. Then, cigarettes. Then, people will start accepting gold. But remember: if you *really* think there's going to be such a collapse, you absolutely must physically possess the gold on your person or in your home. Gold in a faraway bank's vault ain't gonna cut it, since they'll just take your stuff and run.
Oh, and: dada21's spiel about the gold standard in 3...2...1...
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Slightly OT: It always seemed ridiculous to me how people hoard metals underground waiting for global currency collapse, as if the they expect the demand for jewelry to go up a thousand-fold the day after world-wide economic apocalypse
I don't horde gold directly. I hold it in a fund [yahoo.com] which does it for me. I also think it isn't going to do a bit of good in a world-wife economic pocky-clypse. It is a part of a well-balanced portfolio.
However, given the behavior of the dollar recently (recently including both the last few months and much of the previous century...) this is insurance against the dollars in my wallet and bank account losing their value.
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Money is just a commodity. Gold is just a commodity. Coffee is just a commodity.
When one of them is devaluing, the tendency is to move your value out to another one, which isn't devaluing. It isn't a case of demand for gold increasing or the value of the gold increasing, but demand for the currency decreasing along with it's value. Historically, over thousands of years, gold has continued to maintai
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Will people horde it underground? Will I be able to trade ETFs of it on the NYSE? Will the federal reserve bank be responsible for limiting the number of fibers laid in order to curb inflation?
People will and already do work on it's creation and storage. They are thwarted by incumbents and regulations.
People also trade it's value. This is how P2P works and it's infinitely more fair than any central exchange.
Didn't ENRON try that? (Score:3, Interesting)
I think they wanted to try that with comsumer broad band, treating it like electricty.
Different rates for different times of day etc.
I could be wrong, I'm reciting this from memory
Anyway, my point is look at Enron now...
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Internet bandwidth shares some of the characteristics of other utility services, particularly transmission capacity. Look how Enron manipulated that in California to get a good idea of what might result. Take a look at how the broadband providers are attempting to carve it up into different tiers of service (one of the issues involved with net neutrality) and it looks like Son of Enron may be about to be born.
Perhaps its time to start shorting telecom stocks.
Re:Didn't ENRON try that? (Score:4, Insightful)
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Hey, remember that other company that tried this? (Score:2)
ENRON anyone? (Score:3, Interesting)
This is never going to work... (Score:2)
Hey, what gives? The proposed model only allows for women to have future-money! Do these universities think we're stupid or something?!
Just business as usual (Score:3, Insightful)
2. Post on slashdot
3. Link to a program with the option to download.
4. ?????
5. Profit!!!
Oh, the irony... (Score:4, Funny)
Illegal Music? (Score:4, Funny)
Illegal music? Dude, if I could buy music that was illegal, I would do it in a heartbeat. Illegal music must rock hard! It would be like Conway Twitty singing Motorhead songs backed up by the corpses of Dimebag Darrell and John Bonham. Unfortunately, the labels just put out crap.
This is a pretty good idea. (Score:2)
Still, it's a good idea. If I have a file I want to distribute but no bandwidth to do it, I could pay for other people to download my file and distribute it for me via P2P.
The problem is that the p2p client is going to have to track who serves your file and how many times, and clients can't be trusted. It's always going to be vulnerable to hacking and gaming.
This is the dumbest idea I've ever heard (Score:5, Funny)
Internet a global currency? (Score:3, Funny)
Enron (Score:2)
Exact opposite of what has been working well. (Score:2, Interesting)
Actually, the most successful p2p system, bit torrent, has little that promotes fair sharing. That is, in my opinion, one of the reasons it is so successful. It is more communist, and less capitalist; exactly the opposite of the article implies.
Not making sure everything is "fair", but rather giving away freely has less overhead, and is great for when the resources, in this case bandwidth, are in
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But their benevolent action of capping it is to keep you from flooding the market and devaluing it...and thus crashing this new market and making your bandwidth worthless. You see, economics 101.
<grin>
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