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Check out openpatents.org. You get actual real patents on ideas, and then give openpatents.org a grant, saying that anyone can use your patent, provided that any other patents that he owns are also contributed to openpatents.org.

Regards,

Zooko

Chief Hunchback

Evil Geniuses For A Better Tomorrow

• I like PayPal because it has millions of users. The only worrisome thing about PayPal is: what is their business model? Right now they are buying marketshare with their $5 giveaways, and they are also suffering the costs of being based on credit cards, but they are not passing on those costs to their users. I hope they have a good plan for going profitable without losing their attractive features. Also PayPal is specifically disinterested in anonymity, which is a very interesting feature to me.

  But in the meantime I love PayPay because they have millions of users and they are a peer-to-peer payment system, so there is nothing to stop PayPal users from using PayPal to buy another currency like e-gold or Mojo. :-)

• E-gold, I like because it has been around a long time, it is peer-to-peer, allows micropayments, and it is dead simple technically. (That's a feature!)

  Also, the e-gold company really sets a high standard for being in-the-open about their business, including the automatically generated, WWW-accessible auditing information on this page. E-gold doesn't smell of that tricky e-business baloney about living off of gullible venture capitalists until that glorious day when they dominate the market and then they'll somehow figure out how to extract a tithe from their customers.

  I really hope that the e-gold on-line statistics page is the forerunner of the next generation of auditing technology.

• Now Mojo Nation I like because it allows really small micropayments ("nano-payments"?), and it can be unconditionally anonymous in the Chaumian sense (although the current version doesn't use that feature since we don't have a license to use Chaum's patent), and it is integrated into the Mojo Nation globally distributed data haven.

  Oh yeah, and I because I helped write it. :-)

  Mojo Nation is not yet at version 1.0 -- the next version that comes out will be 0.9 -- so it still has performance issues and bugs. You'll hear about it when 1.0 comes out, believe me. :-)

In sum, each of these payment systems have unique features, and I hope that we can link them all together to make the overall digital economy bigger and more fluid. I know that there are already several independent market-makers who will buy or sell e-gold in exchange for other kinds of money. E-gold is older than PayPal and the e-gold company encourages such people and gives them publicity on e-gold.com and so forth.

Regards,

Zooko

digital money enthusiast

Chief Hunchback, Evil Geniuses For A Better Tomorrow

Micropayments involve incredibly small amounts of value. How much does a single HTTP request for 20K of data cost? We're talking about thousandths to millionths of a cent here. The smallest transaction you can make with PayPal is one cent.

As others have mentioned, you can't use PayPal outside of the US...

Mojo Nation is trying to create a mircopayment "barter system" backed in disk space, CPU, and bandwidth. It's bootstrapping the process with a distributed filesystem. You exchange your system resources for "Mojo" which you can exchange with other people consuming their resources (i.e. for downloading data from them). A single Mojo represents an incredibly small amount of value. In the long term we hope that Mojo will float on it's own and people will buy and sell it (possibly by using PayPal for settlement). We also hope people will build other services and charge Mojo.

Check it out, it's really cool, Mojo Nation.

Burris

Paypal is not a micropayment system. Micropayments are by definition -very- small (ie: much smaller than a penny)

Look at Mojo Nation for a micropayment system. (and a distributed data haven system based upon it!)

* Same system as above, but base on file size instead of number of downloads. Or perhaps a combination of the two?

Mojo Nation solves part of this tragedy of the commons problem by doing just what you are proposing. Instead of keeping track of this through a centralized system we use a micropayment system in which users exchange secure digital tokens in return for services. Those who consume without providing resources to the system will eventually run out of credit and be forced to either contribute some resources of their own or buy tokens from someone else.

The market works.

jim

Guilty as charged. (*hang head in shame*)

For the Mojo Nation design we intend on using a reputation-based trust system (similar to Avagato or slashdot moderation) which will allow users to give a thumbs-up or thumbs-down to the accuracy and/or quality of the content. We intend for these "reputation servers" to act as a sort of rating system, directing users to the content that they want and letting the users reinforce the importance of a piece of content

The reason it is not there right now is that we have been spending more time on fixing a few of those bumps in the road that Raph mentioned and less time putting in the features we really want. Our current release is fairly stable and once we have the last annoying bugs hammered out this week we will be adding additional features that make finding content easier.

One little side note: right now all Mojo Nation content can be referenced as a standard URL, so any URL/website rating system could start performing this function now...

jim

Mojo Nation is aimed at providing a distributed content system that gets around these cheating human nature problems by creating a market for exchanging computer resources automatically (bandwidth is the most valuable computer resource left these days, with CPU coming in second).

Mojo Nation is open source (LGPL), check out the latest status by visiting its source forge mojonation project. It is currently in Beta.

It's still under development but all open source. They have a site on SourceForge.

Burris

Napster? The development they are most concerned with is of a legal nature.

There are two serious competitors: MojoNation and Blocks. And they both have to deal with the problems FreeNet deals with now.

The problems are far less trivial you think. On the one hand, you want information to be as dislocal as possible, on the other hand, you want to "localize" (search) the information on the network. An individual host has no idea which keys it is storing (at least in theory), it doesn't know their names (only their hashes) nor does it know the actual content (which is encrypted). So you can't simply say "Server X, tell me what you're storing".

Which is why meta-networks may be necessary, distributed search engines similar to AltaVista, but of a distributed nature. Again a new challenge, perhaps not less complex than FreeNet iself.

So don't trivialize. The FreeNet team is working very hard (just look at their development traffic), but they can't do wonders.

--

Hi! I'm Zooko, Chief Hunchback at Evil Geniuses For A Better Tomorrow.

At DefCon last weekend, we announced Mojo Nation, a content-neutral, efficient file sharing system.

In order to have a truly scalable, truly efficient shared filesystem, you need an accounting mechanism to reward people who contribute and to control leeches who consume more than they offer. Mojo Nation offers this, in the form of a fake currency called "Mojo". You can think of it as a "universal upload/download credit" -- whenever your machine connects to the Mojo Nation network and starts serving up files, it is earning Mojo for you, which you can spend to download files yourself.

Note that all Mojo payments are between individual users -- if you want to use someone else's disk space or bandwidth, you pay them in Mojo, not us. Mojo Nation is highly distributed network and even if Autonomous Zone Industries (the parent company) were to vanish from the face of the earth tomorrow, Mojo Nation would continue.

Mojo Nation just stores bits, and the user interface is HTML and is viewed through your web browser, so it is useful for all kinds of files.

When searching for files, you use a search form which is generated from an XML template. Any user can invent a new content type simply by writing a 5-line XML blurb showing what fields and values people might want to search on.

We've already generated templates for music, Gutenberg Press e-texts, world wide web pages, and Debian packages, but we intend to have basically every content type in the MIME content type lists. Also you can generate your own templates and upload them to our SourceForge CVS server.

Check us out on SourceForge and sign up for the mailing list. And download the software and set up a server and start earning Mojo!

Regards,

Zooko

Hi! I'm Zooko, Chief Hunchback at Evil Geniuses For A Better Tomorrow.

At DefCon last weekend, we announced Mojo Nation, a content-neutral, efficient file sharing system.

In order to have a truly scalable, truly efficient shared filesystem, you need an accounting mechanism to reward people who contribute and to control leeches who consume more than they offer. Mojo Nation offers this, in the form of a fake currency called "Mojo". You can think of it as a "universal upload/download credit" -- whenever your machine connects to the Mojo Nation network and starts serving up files, it is earning Mojo for you, which you can spend to download files yourself.

Note that all Mojo payments are between individual users -- if you want to use someone else's disk space or bandwidth, you pay them in Mojo, not us. Mojo Nation is highly distributed network and even if Autonomous Zone Industries (the parent company) were to vanish from the face of the earth tomorrow, Mojo Nation would continue.

Mojo Nation just stores bits, and the user interface is HTML and is viewed through your web browser, so it is useful for all kinds of files.

When searching for files, you use a search form which is generated from an XML template. Any user can invent a new content type simply by writing a 5-line XML blurb showing what fields and values people might want to search on.

We've already generated templates for music, Gutenberg Press e-texts, world wide web pages, and Debian packages, but we intend to have basically every content type in the MIME content type lists. Also you can generate your own templates and upload them to our SourceForge CVS server.

Check us out on SourceForge and sign up for the mailing list. And download the software and set up a server and start earning Mojo!

Regards,

Zooko

Artists would be better off creating their own sites for fans to download.......

Check out Mojo Nation which is a distributed file system that makes it inexpensive to publish something that is very popular while maintaining a way to get paid. It reduces the load on individual servers by spreading files out among different hosts (redundantly) and uses market economics to prevent the "tradgedy of the commons" problem...

Burris

When will people figure out that nothing is "legal" on the Internet, its just a matter of varying degrees of illegality. Over at Defcon I saw a presentation on Mojonation. Which along with its many flaws (paying for services) is very intriguing.

Isn't Gnutellanet being stopped right now due to some kind of DoS attack (randomized request packets & such)? Have they figured out how to fight those attacks yet?

MojoNation

Burris