[p2p-hackers] good-bye, Mnet, and good luck. I'm going commercial! plus my last design doc (fwd from zooko at zooko.com)

Eric Cordian emc at artifact.psychedelic.net
Wed Mar 9 12:14:42 PST 2005


Zooko writes:

> I am about to accept an exciting job that will preclude me from 
> contributing to open source projects in the distributed file-system 
> space.

> I will miss the Mnet project!  Good luck without me!

Is there a network currently running?  At one time, I had 5 gig of Mnet 
blockstore, but when months went by with no metatracking, and apparently, 
no running network, I grew bored and rm'ed it.

> I'm writing the following as a record of the most advanced design that 
> I have thought of for Mnet. 

[Clippage]]

Yes, well.  My thoughts on this, and other distributed filesystems, are as 
follows.

We have the following useful technologies.

Swarmed downloads, erasure coding, distributed filesystem with global 
namespace, encryption, routing, accounting, and search.

We have various systems which have implemented a various subsets of these 
features, with varying degrees of efficiency.  The killer technology 
amongst all these is obviously swarmed downloading, which, efficiently 
implemented in Bittorrent, currently accounts for a third of network 
bandwidth.

The two systems which implement the most of the above technologies, Mnet 
and Freenet, while theoretically lovely, have at most a niche following, 
and are cumbersome to set up and use, with frequent "issues" in their 
protocols and codebase.

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.

BUT, given that bittorrent is a wild success, which people ACTUALLY USE, 
would it not make more sense to create such a system by augmenting 
bittorrent with the technologies it presently lacks, than by continuing 
development on other systems, many of them bloated and buggy, which have 
been around for years without managing to be made to work well, or 
attracting large numbers of happy and satisfied customers?

If you had a thousand hours of genius programmer time, would you spend it 
embracing and extending Bittorrent, or shoveling through the 
indecipherable bowels of legacy Mnet and Freenet code?

I think Mnet and Freenet were wonderful testbeds, which taught us all a 
lot about what does and doesn't work in grandiose P2P schemes.

But Bittorrent is where the users are, and software without users is like 
network television programming without viewers.  

-- 
Eric Michael Cordian 0+
O:.T:.O:. Mathematical Munitions Division
"Do What Thou Wilt Shall Be The Whole Of The Law"





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