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Yeah, right. Tell that to Digicash and others who failed miserably as attempts to introduce "electronic cash". Their old site isn't even responding anymore. Anyone remember Mojo Nation? Look what's hosted there now (no, I didn't mis-type that, it redirects there... try typing the URL yourself to see).

These are two high profile companies that come to mind right away. It's pretty clear by this point that digital cash and micropayments have been a miserable failure. A lot can be said about what went wrong and why, but the ultimate unescapable conclusion is that a digital cash system with micropayment-level transactions is anything but a simple solution.

They've even considered a method of paying the artists/creators/whatever of the files within MojoNation.

Unfortunately, MojoNation is about as useful as Freenet in its current form (which isn't saying much at all). Making a usable file sharing system out of it is a long way off, and even further off is getting the Mojo economy to work.
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Mojo Nation does have a broker system, but those are also distributed. A rather neat idea actually. You have a file sharing system, a broker system and an indexer, and they are all distributed.

My personal experiences with MN are rather poor unfortunately, I did run a node for a few weeks, but I felt that it didn't result in anything. And uploading a file didn't work for me. It always got stuck somewhere. And the GUI (web based) isn't the best. A lack of feedback to the user.

Those are all nitpicks however, and I do hope that something like Mojo Nation, Newtella, Freenet what not can be spawned from the smoldering remains of Napster.

apple soup may be smoke and mirrors but mojonation is not. it is more reliable than gnutella and without the same controversy as napster. check it out.

IIRC, Mojo Nation allows one to Either pay for service, or share a lot of files. This satisfies both.

If Napster could move to this sort of model, where I can continue to use it for free, as long as I share files, I would not be upset. Napster is a business, and is out to make money. This is not a bad way to go about it, and make the music companies happy at the same time
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Ratios... points... offering services to earn virtual currency which you can spend to download information... sounds like a pretty good idea, eh?

That's what the Mojo Nation folks thought, too.

Personally, I think that the Usenet archive could be very attractive to an ambitious "P2P" company that wants to show that they can re-de-centralize USENET archives while maintaining searchability. Volunteers might be brought in to help host the millions of posts themselves.

Distributed full-text searching, possibly with some sort of centralized assistance, but truly distributed access would make for a pretty mighty technology demo. I wonder if they're up to the task.

Now if Freeboxen used some sort of monetary unit (i.e. Mojo Nation) to help even it out, I would be more likely to give old stuff to get old stuff. I'd rather build a new computer out of old parts than buy one outright anyway. All of my computers are old/stuck together/frankenboxen except one - my iMac. :)


Later...

I can easily envision a future where email is seamlessly encrypted but To and From is recorded for all emails and anybody can be forced to hand over encyption keys given any hint of suspicion of criminal activity (like recieving an email from someone who received email from a person under investigation).

So here's what I'd do:

1. Run Mojo Nation (similar to Gnutella but you can earn money for your bandwidth, disk space, and cpu cycles; see here for details).

2. Since this splits everything up and encrypts it and sends it out, you don't need to be on-line for your partner to download it.

3. You can communicate through a secure channel what to search for, and your partner then searches and downloads it.

4. They communicate back through the same method.

It's like plucking a memo out of a tornado, scribbling something on it, and tossing it back. It's ether -- it's nothingness until it's put back together, then decrypted.

It's two cans and invisible string!

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Micropayments and Scalability Mojo Nation compensates users who provide the resources, content, and indexing services. Effectively preventing cheating, denial of service, and freeloading, Mojo Nation fosters an information market for all types of content. This is accomplished through a micropayment system which denominates the internal tokens, called Mojo, in the same resources needed to provide the services: disk space, bandwidth, and CPU cycles. In time you will be able to buy and sell these tokens, turning Mojo your earn into real dollars.