[tahoe-dev] Resurrecting Mojo Nation

[Jack Byer]

>> Do you think the more broader scope of Mojo Nation as a platform for
>> market based allocated of computing resources is unworkable in
>> principle or was it just a matter of being too ambitious for its time
>> and/or poorly managed as a project?
>
>Level 1: Tahoe-LAFS as it currently exists. One set of storage servers
>constitutes a grid. The administrator(s) authorize someone to run a
>storage server by sharing the introducer furl with them. This same act
>is also necessary and sufficient to authorize someone to run a storage
>*client*.
>
>Level 2: the first results from Brian's imminent Accounting project.  ...
>
>Hey, wait a second. Could we have this conversation on the tahoe-dev
>mailing list? Just subscribe to it and post your question above.
>Thanks! :-)
>
>Regards,
>
>Zooko

Hello, all. My name is Jack and I am a non-coding Linux geek with an
interest in economics. I was an avid Slashdot reader when the Mojo
Nation project was announced and was very excited by the idea. My
takeaway from the project was that it was about using market economics
to allocate computing resources. Unfortunately it didn't work out but
parts of it still live on, such as this project.

Recently on the Bitcoin forums the idea came up to form a digital
currency-based filesharing network and that thread
(https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=86384.0) reminded me of MN,
leading to a discussion of whether or not it would be practical to
bring back the idea of a market-based computing resource allocation.

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. Now, ten years later, automated
trading algorithms are common so perhaps it would be possible for a
network to use dynamic pricing to allocate hard drive space,
bandwidth, and CPU power.

Are there any fundamental reason why a system like Mojo Nation
couldn't work now that certain capabilities are available that weren't
a decade ago?

Jack
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