Re: [Mldonkey-users] speedup distribution of rare files [Was: Re: How to fight abuse of mldonkey]

[Goswin Brederlow]

Maxence Guesdon <address@hidden> writes:

> On Wed, 04 Sep 2002 22:32:47 +0200
> Jochen Radmacher <address@hidden> wrote:
> 
> > >Just my opinion here: Having a monetary system is not very good
> > >for rare files, or not very popular files. 
> > >
> > Full Ack. But how about going one step further:  If you could give 
> > priority to some files you are sharing you would speedup the spreeding 
> > of rare files.
> 
> The problem is that the files i have are rare because it does not interest
> a lot of people. I could offer the file for a high price (as Goswin suggested)
>  so I can download more by uploading less, but if I think my rare file is 
> interesting or good, I'd like other people to listen or see it and don't 
> want to prevent them from downloading it from me because of the price.

Price should be determined by availability and demand. The easiest way
would be to raise price if your upload is maxed out and to lower it if
its idle.

If you have rare files you wouldn't have much upload and thus prices
would be cheap.

But if you have a rare file thats popular the price would go up.

I would further suggest that with each block one uploads to a client
the price should go up. That way clients will give up after some time
and let other clients connect.

> I don't think introducing a money system is a good thing. After all,
> all p2p networks have leechers, and there will always be such people.
> What is important is that they don't prevent sharing users to find, download
> and upload files. I think that detecting leechers of protocol abusers
> (for example, being connected to many servers at once, sending queries
> too often wrt the 'legal delay', ...) and blacklisting them is a better 
> solution, with blacklists shared among servers (maybe with a vote system).
> 
> Another problem with the money system is that the user will have to choose
> a policy for 'buying' blocks from some people and not from others, or
> to manually select what he wants to buy when he sees the sources of the 
> blocks he wants. If it is automatic, it may make him download one block
> with a high price (a too hich price by someone wanting to make money),
> letting him no money to buy other blocks. Should a money system be
> used, i think all blocks should have the same price, which brings
> us back to my problem with my rare files that nobody wants :-(

You could simply set a certain price/block and a fund for a file. You
initialise the fund with some of you money and start downloading. The
price/block filters out extrem prices. If you share something you
downloaded that money could go back into the fund for that file.

The price/block value could be set so that the money in the fund is
enough to download the file. That way, if you reupload enough of a
file you can even download realy expensive blocks.


But you are right fearing about prices of blocks. One could upload a
very popular file and make each block more and more expensive. People
who have 99% of a file probably pay anything to get the last
block. But I don't see that as a too big problem if forward error
correction is implemented. Then only a fraction of the total blocks
available of a file is needed to restore the original file. One could
allways request a block that noone else has, pay a horendous price and
get the money back by sharing the block much cheaper.

Also clients with a "evil" price policy could loose
reputation. Clients could collect and share pricing policies of other
clients.

MfG
        Goswin