On 2012-06-10 2:07 PM, Jack Byer wrote:
This isn't the first time a combination of Bitcoin and tahoe-lafs has been suggested but I'd like to ask a different question than just whether or not is makes sense to use bitcoins to pay people for storage. Is it practical to go back to the original goal of MN instead of a limited subset if the reasons for the project's failure are addressed? From what I can tell the pricing mechanism of MN was broken because it didn't really have a market. A market needs independent decision-making agents bidding against each other to resolve conflicting goals and MN didn't have that. It's not realistic to expect users to sit in front of a screen all day and daytrade Mojo in order to achieve price discovery.
Mojo nation had an automatic auction scheme: When acting as a server your computer serviced requests starting with those offering the best price, down to the worst, thus when operating as a server, automatic price discovery. When acting as a client the client should have automatically adjusted its offers in accordance with its user's performance goals and price limits, trying automatically to pay the lowest price consistent with adequate service, trying to discover market clearing prices with minimal human intervention and make that information available to the user. I don't think it did. So as a server, there was automatic price discovery, as a client, there was, to the best of my knowledge, no useful automatic price discovery. For micropayments, where your computer performs lots of transactions on your behalf without consulting you, this was an unacceptable flaw. I have never seen a post mortem from the Mojo Nation developers. Would like to see one. Perhaps one exists, and I just missed it. Seems to me that Tahoe fails because it retreated from the goals of Mojo Nation - as Mojo Nation itself did. To achieve reliability, you really want a large number of servers, for a large number of servers you need a large community, preferably the entire world as one community, but if you have large community, tahoe gives you the tragedy of the commons. Tahoe relies on social enforcement of good behavior. A community large enough to produce benefits from shared and distributed storage is large enough that the cost of informal social enforcement of good behavior is excessive - and bad social behavior results in unreliable storage. Also, tahoe abandons EGTP. We need a replacement for TCP that provides end to end encryption, protocol negotiation, and NAT tunneling. TCP is an unworkable protocol in a large, untrusting, and untrustworthy society. EGTP was such a replacement, or was intended to be such a replacement. I would say that the main result of the Tahoe experiment is that you really have to do what Mojo Nation attempted to do, and that the subset has problems. Bittorrent was a successful descendent of Mojo Nation, but because storage is not rewarded, torrents go unseeded. Need to reward both storage and bandwidth. Mojo Nation done right would be bittorrent with the capability to support both mutable and immutable files (a torrent is an immutable file), with an incentive to seed, and with the capability to support an enormous number of inactive seeds without overhead costs. We would like the capability to support mutable files, as tahoe does, so that we can have lists of immutable files, as tahoe does. Such a mutable list would be the equivalent of the pirate bay. _______________________________________________ tahoe-dev mailing list tahoe-dev@tahoe-lafs.org https://tahoe-lafs.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/tahoe-dev ----- End forwarded message ----- -- Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a> http://leitl.org ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://www.ativel.com http://postbiota.org 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE