-- On 9 Mar 2005 at 12:14, Eric Cordian wrote:
Now, I think we can all agree that it would be lovely to have a distributed filesystem, with a global namespace, that anyone can put stuff in, and take stuff out of, which guarantees anonymity for both producers and consumers of content, swarms downloads, has an redundant distributed encrypted backing store that lasts forever, is easily and quickly searched, can be instantly set up by anyone who wishes to use it, never breaks, and starves users who unreasonably leech large amounts of resources without reciprocating.
Bittorrent, alone, starves users who leach without reciprocating, but only in certain very limited ways. As a result of that and swarming Bittorrent has far more bandwidth available than any other file sharing network. You can download big files faster. If you want to download big files, use Bittorrent, or hell will freeze over before your files complete. But it does not have more files available, indeed it has fewer, because there is no reward to users for making a wide range of files available. The enormous success of bittorrent, and its limitations, should tell us that the principle of rewarding uploaders and storers, and starving leachers, is pretty much central to the success of a protocol and its software. --digsig James A. Donald 6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG MHH97gJAm7xaefDsVkckpP3M1T3kFYcHHE4T6q6e 4sy0PVrzWWflVPEeAHnZN9+Cf4YNPT7P4feuRNy00