The Gnutella Paradox

bemis writes "Red Herring is running an article about Gnutella and how its success may ultimately cripple it ... also covers the background for the uninitiated (like much of the 'management-types' that read RedHerring) of Gnutella, and Nullsoft itself." The article covers a lot of ground and is worth a read.

Comments

A cool alternative, Mojo Nation

[burris]

The article mentions Mojo Nationin passing at the end of the article but doesn't discuss the things that Mojo Nation does that differentiate it from other p2p filesharing protocols and how it solves some of Gnutella's problem.

Mojo Nation is a p2p file sharing protocol that has a built-in digital cash system. It prevents the "Tragedy of the Commons" problem by effectively creating a barter system for bandwidth, disk space, and CPU. In order to search, upload, download, or otherwise consume any resources from the remote host you must compensate them with the internal currency, known as Mojo. The Mojo represents the resources you are consuming from the counterparty. This way nobody can consume more resources than they are contributing to the system. Each person who joins helps to make it stronger. Note that contributing resources doesn't mean uploading files. You must pay Mojo to upload since you are consuming other servers disk, bandwidth, and CPU by uploading blocks to them and asking the servers to hold them.

The best way to get Mojo, so you can get the files you are interested in, is to provide your own resources (bandwidth, disk, CPU) to the network by using the Mojo Nation Broker (our name for the client software) to run a Block Server, Content Tracker, or Relay server.

A Block Server holds the actual data. In Mojo Nation, instead of holding an entire file on a single server, every file is broken up into many redundant blocks which are spread over many block servers throughout the network. You only need half of the available blocks to reassemble the original file. Of course, the Broker does all of the hunting for and reassembling of blocks transparently. In this way Mojo Nation is like a big distributed RAID drive which makes it resistant to servers disappearing. It also spreads the load out over many hosts, so when you download you are not impacting any single host or network connection severely (expect perhaps your own). It also means that hosts with slow net connections can hold data since each block is pretty small. Your Broker can download some blocks from slower servers in parallel with more blocks from faster servers. The Broker keeps track of performance statistics for each host so it can make intelligent choices about where to purchase blocks from.

Content Trackers are like the search engines in Mojo Nation. Instead of routing all searches through the entire network (which is what is bringing Gnutella down). Mojo Nation has centralized content trackers, but anyone can run one. The content trackers store rich XML metadata describing the files so you can easily search on different fields. The metadata also holds the instructions for your Broker to find and reassemble the blocks that comprise the file. So if you run a Block Server but not a content tracker you cannot know what data you are holding.

Relay Servers are for people behind firewalls. Mojo Nation is an asynchronous protocol. Relay Servers are used so you can send a request to someone behind a firewall. The Relay server holds messages for the clients to pickup, in exchange for some Mojo of course. Relay Servers will also be used for Digital Mix untraceability, much like the old Cypherpunk remailers.

In any event, it is extremely cool and is definitely worth checking out

Burris

Overlooked dynamics

[Cryofan]

There are some factors that are being overloked here:
First, many people such as myself have downloaded music from Napster. But the type of music downloaded is important. I have downloaded songs from my past. These songs are important to me because they represent my youth. But now I have a gig or so of my youth, and that is all I need of that type of music.

New music I do not dl from Napster; I stream that from mp3.com. THis music is from unknown artists. When I compare it to new mainstream music, music which must be paid for, I find it to be just as good.

That is because new mainstream music does have its hooks in me like the old music. And BTW, this is the real intellectual property insofar as music is concerned: connection to the listeners' past.

But all these former dynamics will be swept aside by the new Net distribution model. I encourage all of you to try streaming some of the new music from www.mp3.com, especially the electronic music; often this is made by one person on a computer. It's fantastic! Also check out all the foreign ethnic music offerings. It's all free and legal--and very good.