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Networking The Almighty Buck IT

Internet Bandwidth to Become a Global Currency? 115

Posted by ScuttleMonkey 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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Internet Bandwidth to Become a Global Currency? More

Internet Bandwidth to Become a Global Currency?

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  • As long as our ISP's stop capping our ilimited bandwitch, yeah.
    • or people are stuck with dial-up or high cost with FAP sat links.

    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by Radon360 ( 951529 )

      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>

      • And how exactly does overselling and then compensating by capping promised bandwidth instead of fixing the problem fit into econ 101?

        It sure as hell doesn't fit into any 'ethics 101' classes. It doesn't even fit into the 'scrapping a little extra cash off the top category.' See also: lying, steeling, fucking its customers.
      • Exactly. This idea is completely retarded. They're basically trying to make a currency out of something where supply increases exponentially, ie - hyperinflation. Wow. What a great idea... I don't see a flock of investors running to Zimbabwe to get a piece of their currency. I would say it's analogous to making DRAM a currency. The 1GB of DRAM you buy today will be worth half it's value next year. Yay!

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by janvo ( 639733 )
      Interesting that is exactly what the federal reserve does in the name of 'controlling inflation'...

  • Doesn't make any sense... (Score:3, Insightful)

    by SoapBox17 ( 1020345 ) on Wednesday August 29, 2007 @04:18PM (#20404485) Homepage
    How can a peer to peer system running in your house provide bandwidth to anyone else? 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. Thus, this becomes the stupidest thing I heard of today.

    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by n3m6 ( 101260 )
      It makes sense if you use this in the context of torrents. Sites like demonoid already requires you to upload as much as you download. In other words, exchange of your bandwidth(upload) for content.

      • Paying for uploads is the only way P2P can work (Score:5, Interesting)

        by killbill! ( 154539 ) on Wednesday August 29, 2007 @04:49PM (#20404863) Homepage
        Video download services (legal or illegal) have been looking at P2P to reduce costs. The problem is that most consumers' broadband connections are highly asymmetrical. In my country, 20 Mb/s down connections are common, but upload speeds are only 1 Mb/s.

        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. ;)
        • As much as I hate replying to myself, I think I need to clarify how our work differs from Tribler (which appears to have gone very similar routes, technically). We started developing that extension because we thought that while BitTorrent could help lower hosting costs, it needed an overhaul before it could be considered seriously by a commercial web site. So we went and fixed that.

          Snowball (as our extension is called) is designed around a web site, since we considered that a commercial web site would want

        • Re: (Score:1)

          by fmobus ( 831767 )
          I am not a network engineer, but isn't this problem solvable with multicast? If so, why is it so hard to implement?

          • Multicast solves the problem well for broadcast, or for extremely popular YouTube videos, when lots of people are watching the same video at the same time. It doesn't work when each user wants to watch a different video.

            This user upload model would work well for videos that are popular enough that many people are watching them, but not so popular that lots of people are watching them simultaneously. If the video isn't popular, no users will have downloaded it and therefore nobody can upload it to new u

        • It seems very related to a work published in the USENIX Technical Conference 07 as well as an SOSP 06 one. http://www.ics.uci.edu/~msirivia/publications/dand elion-usenix.pdf [uci.edu] http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/lorenzo/papers/bar- gossip.pdf [utexas.edu]
        • 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.

          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"?
        • What's keeping ISPs from offering full symmetrical internet speeds in America? For example, in Japan you can already get fiber with 100M both ways. Not so with Verizon's FiOS. They're both fiber, so is it just Verizon's greed that keeps us from getting technology as good as Japan? Don't go into the "America is bigger" argument either- we all know full well there are many places that don't even have DSL/cable, let alone fiber.
          • US telcos chose ATM-based BPON and GPON equipment that is compatible with their existing DSL mindset and management infrastructure, and those standards were designed to be asymmetric. Japanese ISPs chose EPON because it is cheaper and faster and they don't care about backwards compatibility.
            • And they don't have existing DSL infrastructure either? Let's see- according to my hi-ho (Japanese ISP run by Panasonic; info sheet came with my Japanese Toughbook) information sheet, their ADSL (notice it's asymmetric too?) runs at 40M/?M (didn't say and can't find info) for $50/month, 12M/1M ($35/month), 3M/1M (about $30/month), and 1M/512k ($25/month). This is Japan, though- I mean, who's going to go for the 3M/1M, or the 1M/512k? But their upstream speeds definitely beat what exists in America. I don't

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by Kjella ( 173770 )
          I understand that if you basicly get the consumers to take over your bandwidth bill, all is well. But I can't possibly understand how it's cheaper to pay for very expensive last-mile bandwidth instead of bulk bandwidth on the backbone, unless the consumers are seriously undercharging you. ISPs will beat you at your own game by setting up local servers inside their own network, while profiling the upload bandwidth you want away. Why would ISPs be reduced to penny-pinching proxies when they can so easily be t
        • In my country, 20 Mb/s down connections are common, but upload speeds are only 1 Mb/s.

          In my country, 1.5 Mb/s down connections are common, but upload speeds are only 30 Kb/s.
    • your internet connection is a 2 way street ...
    • I think the problem this is trying to solve isn't *network* bandwidth, it's *upload* bandwidth. As in, how to get more people to share a given file so that people can download it better. The way to solve the *network* bandwidth problem is to find a way to make ISPs not become legal targets by caching data (which I would assume means that it has to be impossible to find out what exactly it is that they're caching).

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by FLEB ( 312391 )
      It's not so much a matter of speed increases, but bandwidth cost decreases. Your bit of residential bandwidth might not be optimal, might or might not be better, but it's usable, and it can be used to send content stored on your machine to someone directly, saving the otherwise-provider money in not having to use their metered bandwidth, of which they'll give you a cut of some sort.

      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

    • 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.
      Exactly. If the provider sends the data to two recipients they pay to send it twice. If they send it to you and then you send it out to the second person, they pay to send it once.

    • 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

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Nullav ( 1053766 )
      If my upstream connection's capped at 256Kb/s, whoever tries to download something from me would be fucked. On the other hand, if that person kept seeding the file (and so did I), the next person could get it at potentially double the rate (assuming the same upstream bandwidth for both). You would have a good point if most ISPs didn't have such low upstream caps. (Then again, I'd be more worried about clogging the tubes if a handful of people had the ability to flood the link to pass videos along.)

      As for re
    • It is in fact stupid, but not for the reasons that you believe. In P2P, you most certainly are not a bandwidth sink; rather, you're a distribution node, equivalent to a cache point like a Squid proxy. The general mechanism underlying this network isn't that the bandwidth appears out of nowhere; it's the observation that people almost never use the upstream they pay for, and that therefore they can share their upstream as a way to amortize costs. Your criticism seems to presume that a P2P node must first
  • Iran and Iraq dropped the American Currency for oil purchases

  • FAIL (Score:3, Insightful)

    by BlueParrot ( 965239 ) on Wednesday August 29, 2007 @04:20PM (#20404515)
    One of the requirements of money is that it is standardised across the economy. Internet bandwidth fails at so many points here, and that isn't the only problem.
    See:
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Money#Economic_charac teristics [wikipedia.org]

    • Inherently not a 'currency' (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Doug Merritt ( 3550 ) <doug@noSPaM.remarque.org> on Wednesday August 29, 2007 @04:38PM (#20404731) Homepage Journal

      One of the requirements of money is that it is standardised across the economy. Internet bandwidth fails at so many points here, and that isn't the only problem.

      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.

      • And trade with money is just barter by another name. I agree that bandwidth doesn't make a particularly good currency.

         

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by khallow ( 566160 )

        Indeed. Bandwidth may be a commodity, for instance, but in no way can it be a 'currency'.

        I don't see your point. Basically, everyone wants to download data. How do you keep track of who's contributing to the P2P community and who's mooching? Face it, raw bytes are a de facto currency for a primitive marketv like P2P.

        • Indeed. Bandwidth may be a commodity, for instance, but in no way can it be a 'currency'.

          I don't see your point. Basically, everyone wants to download data. How do you keep track of who's contributing to the P2P community and who's mooching? Face it, raw bytes are a de facto currency for a primitive marketv like P2P.

          My point was merely that "currency" is the wrong word.

          See pretty much any mainstream source that discusses the evolution of money from ancient barter systems up to today's rather abstr

    • 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)

    by Lord Ender ( 156273 ) on Wednesday August 29, 2007 @04:22PM (#20404533) Homepage
    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?

    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)

      by UbuntuDupe ( 970646 ) * on Wednesday August 29, 2007 @04:50PM (#20404873) Journal
      We spent all that effort mining the gold, and then we put 95% of it back underground intentionally!

      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...

      • Gold in a faraway bank's vault ain't gonna cut it, since they'll just take your stuff and run.
        ok. I suspect you're thinking of a much larger collapse of civilisation than even the goldbugs. A country can just about operate with high inflation... You just have to lug money to the shops by the wheelbarrow load.

         

    • 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.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Manchot ( 847225 )
      If you're going to use something physical as currency, energy is a far better thing to back it with. Think about it: it's conserved, everything costs it to make it, and it has intrinsic value to all of us. (The gold standard, by comparison, is idiotic. Gold has very little use, can be created and destroyed, and is completely arbitrary. When the conquistadors stole gold from the natives and returned it to Spain, they were not really contributing to the European economy: gold only had value because they said
      • I have a lot of hot air to sell you in the Sahara.

      • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

        by ichigo 2.0 ( 900288 )
        Energy would be a much better currency than gold, but how would you use it in trade? And what about energy losses? Inflation of paper currency is already bad enough, but now we would have to start worrying about our money literally disappearing into thin air. The reason gold is popular as an alternative is its rarity and ease of storage. You don't need tons of it to buy a house, but you would need a lot of batteries to do the same.

        • Re: (Score:1)

          by Paco103 ( 758133 )

          Energy would be a much better currency than gold, but how would you use it in trade?
          I have the solution! For investment opportunities, e-mail me with subject="Enron"
      • Gold has plenty of uses. It's exceptionally malleable, and ductile, but otherwise very durable, and resistant to corrosion. It has very high electrical conductivity. It is also comparatively rare. Best of all, it is shiny, and people (much like crows) like shiny things. Gold has always had value in human societies, and barring some major changes in human psychology (or an efficient method to use nuclear transmutation to create it) it always will. It doesn't "have value because they said it had value"

      • If you're going to use something physical as currency, energy is a far better thing to back it with.

        Finally, somebody who understands why coins should be forged of fissile uranium!

    • At least you can't create gold out of thin air like the fractional reserve banking does with currency.
    • Except that gold maintains it's value in the face of a devaluing currency. But then, so do other commodities.

      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

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Erris ( 531066 )

      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.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by thelexx ( 237096 )
      Don't want your share of the gold? I'll take it.

  • Didn't ENRON try that? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by xgr3gx ( 1068984 ) on Wednesday August 29, 2007 @04:28PM (#20404605) Homepage Journal
    If you ever watch the Documentry or read the book "The smartest guys in the room", you'll see that ENRON was trying to commoditize everything.
    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...

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by DimGeo ( 694000 )
      Was just gonna say that, saw that movie from NetFlix online... By the way, the same thing also reminds me of a notorious explanation of the internet involving trucks and tubes...

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by PPH ( 736903 )
      Yes, they did.


      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)

      by aafiske ( 243836 ) on Wednesday August 29, 2007 @06:11PM (#20405719)
      Yeah, clearly it was their bandwidth commoditization scheme that ruined them. Not the massive corruption, embezzling and outright theft that went on.

    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by khallow ( 566160 )
      And if you actually understood what Enron did, you'd know that the commodization wasn't the problem. As another poster notes, it's the manipulation of shoddily regulated markets, corruption, book cooking, and some of the stupidest scams to ever involve business. Eg, a $3 billion electricity plant in India (the scam was that the state government there would cough up some ridiculous amount of money per month, but it got blocked easily by the courts) and a further billion in dark fiber. When done sanely, comm

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by xgr3gx ( 1068984 )
        I wasn't saying that the bandwidth thing is what killed them...I know that it was the countless other shady things they were doing like hiding debt in fake businesses and investments. My comment wasn't too clear, but I was trying to say they were doing as one of their shady schemes, and abandoned it pretty quickly because it wasn't working.
  • I am a bit wary of 'bandwidth trading' even since Enron: "Enron grew wealthy, it claimed, through its pioneering, marketing and promotion of power and communications bandwidth commodities". What ever came of Enron? I don't remember....

  • ENRON anyone? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by SengirV ( 203400 ) on Wednesday August 29, 2007 @04:31PM (#20404659)
    This is the same thing that brought Enron down. Well, that and causing power plants in Cali to go tits up to greatly increase the price of electricity.
  • Then the US is already so far behind that we're the Poor Man of Europe.
  • They are proposing earn-and-spend market model, where the more a user uploads now and the higher the quality of the contributions, the more she would be able to download later and the faster the download speed.

    Hey, what gives? The proposed model only allows for women to have future-money! Do these universities think we're stupid or something?!

    • Hey, what gives? The proposed model only allows for women to have future-money!
      So, what you're saying is, you've never been married. Since it's Slashdot, I'm willing to bet that the easiest way to explain is this: the wallet scene in the Jetsons intro is essentially true. (In other words, the proposed model changes nothing.)

  • Just business as usual (Score:3, Insightful)

    by ttapper04 ( 955370 ) on Wednesday August 29, 2007 @04:35PM (#20404705) Journal
    1. Write an article and give it a sensational headline.
    2. Post on slashdot
    3. Link to a program with the option to download.
    4. ?????
    5. Profit!!!

  • Oh, the irony... (Score:4, Funny)

    by Doctor Memory ( 6336 ) on Wednesday August 29, 2007 @04:42PM (#20404779)

    "The application, available for free download
    Guess we won't be seeing this phrase much anymore...

  • Illegal Music? (Score:4, Funny)

    by toupsie ( 88295 ) on Wednesday August 29, 2007 @04:45PM (#20404813) Homepage
    Peer-to-peer has received a bad rap, however, because of its frequent association with illegal music or software downloads.

    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.

  • Enron tried doing this, although I have no idea if what they were doing had any technical merit or whether they were selling hot air.

    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.
  • If I'm being a troll forgive me, but how can bandwidth be currency? Isn't the whole basis of economics scarcity? Won't bandwidth eventually become basically infinite it grows to the point when we could saturate all 5 senses with data? We already passed audio (you can download audio in better quality than your ears faster than you can listen to it). Video is coming up. The rest is just a matter of time.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Detritus ( 11846 )
      The demand for bandwidth is nearly infinite. I'd love to put a wideband antenna in every major city in the world, each connected to a high-speed ADC and a high-speed Internet connection. Anyone who received that data stream could use a software-defined receiver, or conventional receiver, to listen to radio broadcasts and watch television programs from that city. Think of it as a remote antenna with a really long cable. It would drive the lawyers nuts.

    • If I'm being a troll forgive me, but how can bandwidth be currency? Isn't the whole basis of economics scarcity?

      Well, it's valuation, which sometimes derives from scarcity. That said, it's not like it's particularly hard to find a dollar.

      Won't bandwidth eventually become basically infinite

      No.

      We already passed audio (you can download audio in better quality than your ears faster than you can listen to it).

      Well, that's not exactly true - good luck finding sourcing samples at that rate (don't confuse bitstrea

      • Excellent rebuttal. By scarcity I meant the strict economic definition that there is a limited amount of something. I know bandwidth is the same (there is a definite limit) but since bandwidth follows semiconductor evolution we can expect at least another decade of internet growth comparable to the last one. In 97 most of us were still using dial up.

        If a dollar did this we would consider it catastrophic inflation, witch come to think of it is my problem with this idea of bandwidth currency. What is great fo

        • By scarcity I meant the strict economic definition that there is a limited amount of something. I know bandwidth is the same (there is a definite limit)

          Scarcity by the strict economic definition implies that new volume cannot be generated. Gold, copper and plutonium are economically scarce. Trees are not - you can grow more of them. The issue of time frame does not factor into scarcity; only a fundamentally limited quantity in a market region (in this case, Earth.) By that definition, bandwidth certainl

  • any internets I get from posting anything full of win are now actually worth something?
  • A message from the Tribler researchers...:

    Download of the software [harvard.edu]
    Planned next features and documentation [harvard.edu]
    Browse the Python code (LGPL) [tribler.org]
    SVN repository [tribler.org]
    Scientific paper on Give-to-Get algorithm [harvard.edu]

    Please post any question you have and we will reply asap.
  • It's Delft University of Technology, not Delt as the summary reads.
  • I'll be paying for my mercedes in bandwidth. Ok sir, that will be 600GB. Here you go.

  • Internet a global currency? (Score:3, Funny)

    by ScrewMaster ( 602015 ) on Wednesday August 29, 2007 @06:49PM (#20406033)
    Makes sense to me, so long as I can pay my Internet bill with my illegal downloads.
  • Isn't this what Enron attempted to do (to some extent)? Didn't they run an arbitrage exchange over dark fibre and potential bandwidth? If I remember correctly, Enron did not end up as a model of corporate ethics, innovation (except accounting practices) or good sense.
    • Given that logic, I should stop having a cleaning crew come to my office - why, Enron did that, too. (Translation: just because Enron did bad things doesn't mean everything they did is a warning flag.)

  • Successful peer-to-peer systems rely on designing rules that promote fair sharing of resources amongst users.

    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

    • Re: (Score:2, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Not quite. BitTorrent had the "tit for tat" functionality from the start, which does a rough approximation of this idea on a fairly fine-grained basis; if you send, you're much more likely to be the recipient of the available capacity. It breaks down when your peer doesn't have metrics for how productive you are. Seeds can only tell how much you download, so they send pretty much randomly.

      BT wasn't first either, of course. If I recall correctly edonkey had a ticket system to do the same thing, allocating ea
  • Gives that old t-shirt a new significance.

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