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Forget Napster & Gnutella: Enter Mojo Nation
burris writes "Salon's Damien Cave writes "Forget Napster and Gnutella. Jim McCoy's Mojo Nation is the coolest file trading service on the net." This OpenSource distributed filesystem uses digital cash technology to create a barter economy for idle disk space, bandwidth, and CPU. Now you can get paid for sharing your computer."
...who own printing presses. In Mojo Nation there is no "big iron and bandwidth to host this stuff", that is all provided by the Mojo Nation infrastructure. In other words everyone contributed a part of this big iron and bandwidth and gets "paid" for the percentage they are throwing in to answering a request.
How about this for a possibility: what if the cost of pulication was next to nothing (but not zero or else it is too easy to flood the network) and the cost of distribution was paid for by the user who actually download the data. In other words almost no cost to publish to the net. In return for the faustian bargain I will allow users to be fair (by leaving a tip) which is about the only thing we have come up with yet for artist compensation, but if others have better ideas please let us know
jim
Hi guys.
I just thought I'd interject with a few facts about Mojonation.
1. You do not need content to get Mojo. You can let people use your computer's resources.
2. You can exchange mojo for cash and vice versa (ie. if you don't like to trade files, sell your resources instead - this may be a great way for companies to use idle computers)
3. Mojonation is built to scale. It won't choke like Gnutella.
Please folks, read the damn article before you post. You just come off like idiots otherwise.
rLowe
----- rL
I guess I can argue against Mojonation in another way (really, I'm just trolling ;-),
With Hotline, if you "share" your MP3 collection, yet collect banner revenue, it's illegal, because the sharing is not non-commercial, and therefore is not protected by "fair use".
With Napster, sharing your MP3's with the world IS legal, because it's non-commercial - protected by "fair use".
With Mojonation, you're in-effect, selling your MP3's that you share for Mojo. Which gives you the privilege to buy more MP3's. Which means Mojo is a form of currency (like Slashdot karma, ho ho ho!), I suppose enough ambiguity there to keep a whole BMW-dealership-full of lawyers in Armani socks for the next 5 years. Perhaps it's more of a commodity. Goodie, then the gummint can TAX it. (which is why I troll, because I'm afraid that if Gore's elected, I'll be paying the IRS for my high-karma next April).
Don't get me wrong, I'm not criticising Mojonation, I'm not trying to say it's a bad thing, it's just that, for a global (world-wide, earth-encompassing) search, fragmenting humanity's free-MP3 library under these various services will make certain rare bits harder to find, and, of course, there's that commercial ambiguity with Mojo.
True, the "genetic variety" issue makes it more survivable, as a whole. . . I guess it's an inevitable stage of evolution. (with the final stage being no further legal inhibitions, and all systems being interoperable such that a single point can be searched for that Bathroom recording of Wierd Al's "Another one rides the bus".
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
Since when was it an illegal filetrading scheme?
Even if some people (mis)use it that way, it's a content-trading scheme and a Generally Cool Idea.
That's why I care -- not because of how people will or won't use it, but because the way it works is based on a novel idea. It's called 'geek factor' and is an important concept 'round here. 'Twould be a good thing if you'd familiarize yourself with it.
You are correct that there are problems with the fast and shallow analysis that you seem to present, so here are the fast answers to why these problems will not be the major problem that you claim:
1) You get credit for content you publish so there is an incentive to publish lots of random crap.
This is untrue. You do not get Mojo to posting content, you get Mojo for reselling blocks of data to others. In fact, in Mojo Nation there is a minor cost imposed for publication to prevent people from doing the sorts of stupid attacks which you mention. Mojo Nation is built assuming a society of dishonest, distrustful agents. Your agent doesn't get paid (by my agent) until you deliver the goods.
We are also working on a simple collaberative filtering system to allow users to filter out the bad metadata in the system. If someone publishes 3 gb of random noise it will get a few hits and the users will be able to pass back to the content tracker a complaint that the description did not match the content, as a few of these pile up the content description gets fewer hits on search requests and eventually the blocks fade away because no one will buy them.
2) What is the "price" of Mojo.
The reason I tried to avoid that question is that the answer is a little too complex to distill into a sound bite. A unit of Mojo represents a slice of the current capabilities of the system as a whole. If you perform work for me now I give you credits, in the future when the network is larger those credits will represent a slice of a much larger pie and so have increased in value when you spend them. If the network collapses (as you predict) then the only value of those credits are that the company running Mojo Nation will redeem them for storage/message passing service on our own systems.
The problem with quoting a "price" is that everyone will dig it up later and call you a liar for not being able to successfully predict the future product of several different unknown variables in this equation (how large is the network vs. total tokens in circulation, what is the raw replacement cost of the resources, what sort of discount are users willing to make on these resources to attract customers, what is the current demand for each resource in our basket [is bandwidth scare this hour, perhaps disk space?])
Mojo is a mechanism for keeping score in peer to peer systems. The real-dollar value depends on the demand for the services and the supply in the pool. Please don't claim that I am an idiot just because I have a basic understanding of which claims one can and cannot make regarding a future market condition.
jim
looks like the site is about to be ./ed (it was dead slow for me and I am on a T1) So here's the FAQ's
.exe
1. What is Mojo Nation?
Mojo Nation is a worldwide system that enables us to publish and share any kind of data, like
text, sounds, moving and still pictures, and other binary files.
1.1 What makes Mojo Nation different from other file-sharing systems?
Other file-sharing systems are plagued by "the tragedy of the commons," in which rational folks
using a shared resource eat the resources to death. Most often, the "Tragedy of the Commons"
refers to farmers and pasture, but technology journalists are writing about users who download
and download but never contribute to the system. In Mojo Nation, every transaction costs some
Mojo, and as one's Mojo credit limit is reached, one must contribute *something* -- whether
resources or cash -- to the community.
1.2 Is Mojo Nation rated G, PG-13, R, or XXX?
We have no idea. Each file published to Mojo Nation is broken into several small pieces, and
then each of those pieces is broken into eight more pieces and encrypted so securely that finding
the key to the code is as difficult as finding an atom in the sun. The result is that one cannot learn
whether a file is on Mojo Nation or not except by trying to download that specific file.
2. Why isn't the Mojo Nation software working for me?
The three most common reasons we have encountered are:
* The user hasn't started his Broker before launching the gateway page on his web browser.
Under Windows, double-click "Start Mojo Broker" on the desktop. Under Linux, run Broker in
the command shell.
* The Windows software didn't install because Internet Explorer for Windows stripped the
extension from the installation program.
Right-click on the label under the mojonation-beta-0_90-win98 icon and rename the file
mojonation-beta-0_90-win98.exe.
* The user hasn't set the web proxy.
Internet Explorer 4.0: Go to the View menu, pull down "Internet Options...", then click on the
"Connection" tab. Select the "Access the Internet using a proxy server" checkbox, and enter
"localhost" into the "Address:" field and "8000" into the "Port" field. (Users running a later version
of Explorer also have to click "LAN Settings".)
Netscape Communicator 4.7: Go to the Edit menu, and pull down "Preferences". In the Category
window, select "Advanced". The "Advanced" tree will open, then select "Proxies". The Proxies
configuration window opens, then select the "Manual proxy configuration" radio button, and click
the "View" button.
2.1 What does the web proxy do?
If the web proxy is enabled, your browser -- instead of connecting to the host specified in a
http://mojonation.net URL -- connects to the proxy. It is then the proxy's task to make the
connection and return the requested resource. This will be invisible to Mojo Nation users.
2.11 Does using the web proxy reveal my browsing activity to mojonation.net?
No. The proxy runs on your local machine, and it does not log any of your activities nor does it
ever contact mojonation.net for any reason.
When you view a normal web page like "http://www.plastic_daisies_for_sale.com/", the proxy is
transparent -- it doesn't do anything but pass the web page through to your browser, exactly like
normal web surfing. When you view a Mojo Nation page, like "http://mojonation.net/broker/" or
"http://mojonation.net/id/XXXX"[XXXX Zooko: insert cool mojonation id here--Zooko
2000-09-28], the proxy intercepts your request and satisfies it without ever contacting
mojonation.net.
2.2 What if I don't want to use the web proxy?
In Linux, with your Broker running, open the intropage in ~/.mojonation/broker/intropage.html. In
Windows, with your Broker running, open the intropage in C:\Program Files\Mojo
Nation\config\broker\intropage.html.
2.3 Why do I get a symbol not found error from Windows when I try and run the
software?
One error we have seen (most often on Windows NT) is due to older versions of
MSVCRT.DLL being on the system elsewhere and in use by another application (check in
C:\Windows\System\). Our install program does not currently handle this properly. You need to
manually replace the old MSVCRT.DLL file with the new one from the mojonation directory.
3. What is Mojo?
Mojo is Mojo Nation's "digital currency". In the Mojo Nation distributed computing environment,
in which all the computers are joined by a common software, users may choose to contribute
disk space, bandwidth, and processing cycles to the network in exchange for Mojo. Users are
enabled to set their own prices for these online resources.
3.1 How many Mojo are in one dollar?
There is no fixed Mojo-to-dollar ratio. Mojo is exchanged for unused disk space, bandwidth,
and processing cycles, and Mojo is transferred from user to user with tokens -- when we move
past beta, users will be able to buy and sell the tokens for what the market will bear.
3.2 What do the "Mojo coming in" and "Mojo going out" numbers on my Stash page
mean?
The Mojo Nation barter system revolves around credit one user's Broker extends to another.
The Mojo doesn't move until one Broker owes another 10,000 Mojo -- because every
conversation between Brokers on Mojo Nation involves some cost in Mojo, it would be too
burdensome to make a digital token payment each time. So, the "Mojo coming in" total is the
sum of all the Mojo promised to you in an IOU but not yet delivered. The "Mojo going out" total
is the amount of Mojo promised by you.
3.21 I thought beta users were granted one million Mojo to start! Why do I have fewer
than one million Mojo? Auuuugh!
When you first use your account, it takes a little while for your Mojo to gather. Eventually, your
Stash page will report that cool million, give or take that couple of Mojo you earn or spend while
you're on the network. Also, if you halt your Broker while that million is still being credited to
your account, that won't stop the accumulation.
3.3 On my Stash page, I have more Mojo going out than coming in. Why?
The two main reasons are:
It costs Mojo to publish something to the system. When you publish a file, your Broker has to
pay block servers to store the pieces. Further, too much supply, not enough demand. The system
hasn't yet attracted enough users whose Brokers will pay for downloads.
If you're using a relay server, you're paying for it steadily. Mojo Nation users behind a firewall
need to employ a relay server outside the firewall that will hold messages for them until their
Broker goes out to pick them up. However, each time the Broker asks the relay server if there
are any messages there for it, the Broker has to pay the relay server a bit of Mojo.
3.4 How do I earn Mojo?
By running services for other users. Clicking "configure" at the main menu enables you to run
block servers, content trackers, publication trackers, and relay servers, and to set prices for each
of those services.
3.5 If I accumulate enough Mojo, can I buy beer/friends/France?
Eventually. The best-known distributed computing project -- SETI@Home -- accumulated
about 300,000 years of computing time in its first year of operation. If they shared that time with
Mojo Nation for a year, and ran every service while charging default prices, they'd certainly earn
enough to buy beer.
3.6 Can I earn Mojo in Mojo Nation while writing The Great American Novel in my
word processor?
Yes. You don't have to be using the Mojo Nation gateway in order to earn Mojo, as long as
your Broker is running in the command shell (Linux) or MS-DOS window (Windows). Some of
us leave our Brokers on all day, running in the background while we perform other tasks.
4. What is a relay server?
A relay server works like a mailbox for users who are behind a firewall. When the firewalls block
incoming messages from reaching the Brokers -- the agents which run the whole show -- the
relay servers sit outside the firewall and hold messages for the Brokers. The Brokers can go
outside the firewall and retrieve the messages, then bring them back in for processing.
4.1 Why should I choose to run a relay server?
Users who elect to operate a relay server (by clicking "on" for "Relay Server" on the Configure
page) earn gobs of Mojo because the Brokers who work behind the relay server (that is, those
folks behind the firewalls) are continually asking it if there are any messages there for it and are
therefore paying a steady toll in Mojo.
4.2 I'm behind a firewall, but the Mojo Nation software didn't detect it, so my Broker
isn't getting any replies to the messages it sends out. How can I make sure I use a relay
server?
There is an option on the configure page called "Behind A Firewall" that you should change to
"On", save the config, and restart your Broker software.
Alternatively: edit your Broker configuration file (in Unix systems, it's
~/.mojonation/broker/broker.conf, or in Windows, the default path is C:\Program
Files\mojonation\config\broker\broker.conf) and change the "SERVE_USING_A_RELAY"
setting under "YES_NO" to "yes".
4.21 Editing my Broker configuration file seems to be hazardous, since it determines
how my Broker interacts with the system.
Yes, so keep a backup copy, and keep in mind that the tabbing is vital.
4.3 I'm behind a firewall, but don't want to pay a relay server. How can I punch holes in
my firewall?
Consult your firewall documentation.
4.4 Which TCP/UDP ports should I open for Mojo Nation?
Once you've started your Broker, look in its output or log file for a line containing
"TCPCommsHandler: successfully bound to port NNNN" to find out the port number you are
using.
If you wish to use a specific port number, edit your config file and change these settings:
TRANSACTION_MANAGER_LISTEN_PORT:
This is the port you are actually listening on locally.
TRANSACTION_MANAGER_PICKY_PORT: false
If true, this means "barf if I can't get the listen port listed above." Otherwise it'll keep trying other
port numbers until it finds one that works.
People setting things up behind firewalls with tunnels through them may also need to change
these:
TRANSACTION_MANAGER_ANNOUNCED_PORT:
You are announcing to the rest of the world that this is the port on which you are running. If you
have a tunnel through a masquerading/nat firewall, you want to set this to the appropriate port on
the masquerating/nat firewall.
IP_ADDRESS_OVERRIDE:
This is the IP address that your Broker announces to others. If you have a tunnel through a
masquerading/nat firewall, you want to set this to the IP address of the masquerating/nat firewall.
5. Where's the Macintosh version of Mojo Nation?
Ask again after OS X is released. It will be easier to port Mojo Nation to Macintosh under
Macintosh OS X because it is derived from BSD Unix, and the engineers around here are all
Unix nerds.
6. May I publish content to Mojo Nation that no one else can see?
Yes. In the Publish window, click "Browse" to publish a single file, or type a directory path into
the "Select File or Path" field to publish a group of files. Then pull down "None" from the "Select
Content Type" menu, after which this message will appear:
Warning: Content published under the type "None" is afforded absolute privacy because it will be
invisible to searches and content trackers. That also means that the file cannot be found through
normal means should the file's Dinode be forgotten.
If content is published without a content description, the trackers on Mojo Nation are not notified
of its presence and neither can they find it later. However, if you lose the Dinode URL to the file,
you won't be able to find it again, either.
6.1 What's a Dinode?
When your Broker submits a file to Mojo Nation, it first breaks up the file into several small
pieces, then the pieces into smaller blocks which are encrypted for privacy and duplicated for
reliability. The Broker draws a "sharemap" to the location of the blocks, and for further security,
tears up and encrypts the map, too. The list of the blocks which makes up the sharemap is the
"Dinode". Nothing on Mojo Nation can be retrieved without the Dinode. References to Dinodes
in the Mojo Nation web interface are almost always presented in MojoID form, a
human-readable URL.
AdFuel
(a bit of history)
..." Time
Way back in the day, Tim May (cypherpunks)
created a distributed communications prototype
called 'BlackNet', communicating through anonymous
remailers and doing file service, etc. It was
lacking in a viable anonymous payment mechanism,
but was a totally adequate proof of concept for
a totally secure filestore and info-market.
http://www.cl.cam.ac. uk/ users/rja14/eternity/eternity.html
Ross Anderson, a professor at Cambridge University
(and member of the SERPENT AES-candidate team),
worked on specifications for a system which
provided a "global filestore" capable of storing
popular or unpopular content in a distributed,
censorship-resistant fashion, based on electronic
payment, network communication, etc.
Adam Back then implemented "Eternity USENET",
using USENET as a backing store, with a special
web proxy to enter/retreive files.
Napster, Gnutella, Freenet seem to have come from
a completely different direction (particularly
Napster), rather than from the Eternity/BlackNet/etc. tree. Napster is
certainly the least general, but has had the
most commercial/userbase success, which may
be linked. It's certainly a lot easier to understand "Napster is sharing mp3s" than
"mojonation provides distributed file sharing
backed by electronic cash and a system of reputations and agents and brokers and
will tell.
Publius is probably most directly inspired by
Anderson's Eternity Service, but I didn't check
citations.
Mojo Nation is from the same intellectual heritage
as BlackNet/Eternity/etc., but I believe the
foundations were laid at about the same time as
the others, with implementation waiting quite
a while for resources to be available. It looks
like the first viable opportunity to get
electronic cash widely deployed on the Internet...
I think that aspect of Mojo Nation (the mojo part)
is by far more important than the file-sharing
aspect, but it's a bootstrapping problem.
When content is published in Mojo Nation it goes through three steps before it becomes a small block of data which might be published on your host.
1) The file will be encrypted with the hash of the file. (feature in release 0.920 which will be out this week)
2) The encrypted file is broken into fixed-length segments.
3) These segments are pushed through an error-correction code, expanding the N bits into 8 N/4 length segments. (any 4 of the 8 shares are sufficient to reconstruct the orginal block)
These resulting block fragments are then published and are passed through the system. Each block fragment is only identified by its SHA1 hash, to reconstruct a piece of data you need a sharemap which tells you that if you collect a certain set of blocks and reverse the publication process using the instructions contained in the map you get the original file.
If you are holding blocks you have no idea what they are, it is effectively random noise on your system. If you have a map which contains a reference to block that you are holding locally you can figure out that small part of the puzzle, but looking at what is stored locally and knowing what you have is more than just searching for a needle in a haystack...
jim
Yes, critical mass will be important, but security is one of the primary reasons for its existance. Worried about someone using up your disk space? Don't worry because if they do, they have to pay for it (it costs the sender money to publish a file). Worried about someone using up all your CPU? Don't worry, because if they do, you're compensated (virtually). Worried about someone running something on your machine that you don't approve of? Can't happen as the system is currently designed, because noone (currently) provides an open-ended cpu service. You can only do searches, and you are compensated when someone uses your machine to search the network.
The major goals of mojonation are security, privacy, scalability and decentralization. Everything within the network is distributed, including trust. I may be mistaken, but I believe even the compensation medium (mojo) is going to be decentralized. There will be no federal mojo reserve or official Mojo Authority.
A lot of the goals are still unimplemented, but some of the features exist now. The best example of where this is headed is how files are published: When you publish a file it is broken up into eight blocks, any four of which can be combined to re-create the original file. Those blocks are sent out to different servers without indication of their contents.
It's not done yet, but it's also not a bad start.
Mojo Nation does not try to open security holes. The service is actually as content-blind as we can make it. That means that it does not know if it is downloading a image, a text file, or a trojan; we expect users to take appropriate steps in watching the content. We do intend on adding additional features which will make "bad data" less of a problem, the first of which is reputation filtering for content descriptions -- does this search result point to data that other people have given a thumbs-up to. The current reputation system is internal and used for performing activities like selecting who to buy from and whether it is worth it to pay additional credits to download that block from someone who has low-latency delivery, but we are working on scaling it up to let users make the basic reputation/filtering decisions. We provide the infrastructure, it is up to the users to provide and manage the content.
For preventing problems like eating up all of your CPU time or a rogue agent running rampant through your filesystem, we are trying very hard to do the right thing (for starters by not even trying to execute distirbuted code, CPU cycle costs are included in the costs of reselling or delivering a message.) We have used strong crypto where appropriate and we are aware that all control and trust boundaries are local so we are trying to create the basic infrastructure which takes advantage of this fact.
The market was chosen as our model for resource allocation and trust management because it seems to work. No one trusts other agents in the game, everyone is (usually) trying to selfishly maximize the utility of the system for their own needs, and successful cheating can carry great reward so risk management is built into the basic assumptions about how things work. Still this distributed system ticks right along without Alan Greenspan needing to keep track of where each dollar is spent or the local shoe factory needing to know exactly who is going to be buying the shoes it is creating.
In Mojo Nation you don't trust anyone, your agents are very paranoid about what is outside of their direct control, and choices about trust, performance, and privacy/anonymity can become economic choices on the part of the user.
jim
microsoftword.mp3 - it doesn't care that they're not words...
I think that this could work fairly well if it reached critical mass, but I'm worried about the security of this. Renting out your bandwith or computing power is cool, but doing so leaves huge openings for script kiddies to get in your system and root it. Hopefully some sort of extremely good security will be implemented, otherwise most of the techies who would like to use this program won't due to its security issues.
Colin Winters
Your proposal sounds rather interesting, but I have a few questions that haven't been raised/answered elsewhere...
1) If someone does a complete reinstall on their computer, won't that result in the loss of the content? (I assume that you have some redundancy of data, but the more duplication, the greater the cost in mojo... - Perhaps offer redundancy for a greater cost, but the default be non redundant...)
2) You offer 1 Million mojo for beta testers, what is to stop someone from creating numerous false beta testing accounts (say a skript kiddie installing the mojonation on rooted boxen...), and then transferring all of the mojo to his account.
3) It would appear that your company would be in a similar position to the Federal Reserve - capable of 'printing' additional mojo, causing price inflation. What types of safety mechanisms are in place to keep you (or a clever hacker) from openning up their own 'mojo printing press'?
4) Givin that Mojo transfers have 'float' - that is, payment is not made until a certain level of Mojo is 'owed'. Could not an individual make transfers that were only to just below the threshold, and then no longer use the services of that individual? Thus one could 'owe' 9999 to ten thousand entities, and yet only have a total of 10,000 mojo.. Or create multiple anonymous accounts that each only use 9,999 credits.
5) Can large content easily be broken down into smaller pieces? I realize that a user could break the content apart before uploading it, but it would be nice if I could download partial content of a movie in smaller parts so that my payments are over a longer period of time.
6) If I download content, can I then advertise that I have it available so that I can recoup some of the cost of me downloading the content?
7) Is a method in place to 'stream' the content, if multiple users are willing to wait to download the content at the same time to reduce the cost per user and reduce the resources used by the sender?
Thanks,
LetterRip
Tom M.
TomM@pentstar.com
The primary resource making the market is bandwidth. Disk space comes in second. Modules for reselling CPU time for specific tasks will spring up later but are not the immediate focus of the system (seti@home, distributed.net for mojo anyone?)
:)
Also, for any newcomers to the software, we are expecting a major new release soon that should improve the download speed from mojo nation drastically. The current sucky speed issues are completely client side due to inefficiencies in the way its current downloading code is written. We are rewriting that.
Happy Mojoing!
Greg - mojo programmer
Does the person who originally uploads a file to the network get paid?
No.
Then how do content creators get paid -- what's the incentive for them?
You can earn revenue by publishing through a feature we haven't added yet, which is basically tipping. When you publish you can say, Here's a digital signature on this map: I published this file; this is who to give the tip to.
---
Great! Another system in which the publisher (the people with the money and the big iron and bandwidth to host this stuff) rakes in the profits while content creators have to live on whatever scraps get thrown their way.
Ryan knows this stuff, but for those in the audience who have not been hanging out in crypto and cypherpunk circles for the last ten years:
> Mojo Nation is from the same intellectual heritage
> as BlackNet/Eternity/etc., but I believe the
> foundations were laid at about the same time as
> the others, with implementation waiting quite
> a while for resources to be available.
The original genesis was the "Internet is a Brown Paper Bag" system created by myself, Doug Barnes, and Jerry Porter back in Austin and presented at the HoHoCon '94 conference. Things sat around for a while because we were waiting for two things: digital cash and a raison d'etre. At the time we did this early work connectivity and storage costs were expensive and there was no digital content to speak of. The growth of broadband and flood of digital content(music, video, images, etc.) made this arena more interesting several years ago so that is why we starting talking to lawyers to see if it would be possible to actually implement some of the wacky ideas we used to have.
A digital cash system was the sticking point. All great cypherpunk projects seem to begin with the line "when we have digital cash, we will be able to do X..." Our insight was in realizing that for a distributed system like what we really needed was a method for fairly allocating resources. We combined a cool idea to base a form of currency on payment in kind with a reputation-backed microcredit system to cut down on token clearing overhead and thus was born Mojo Nation.
One insight that Ryan has made which I hope others pick up on is that Mojo Nation is about more than just swapping music or pushing data. We are trying to create a basic infrastructure for any kind of peer to peer transaction, we just happen to think that trust management and resource allocation are the two important problems that need to be dealt with in this space and have targetted our micropayment system in this direction.
jim
The more of these file-sharing systems we get, the less likely it is that they'll be shut down by "da man".
Unfortunately, when we splinter the "file-sharing community" like this, we get divergent standards, content, and we start to lose the appeal that a system like Napster had, where EVERYBODY was on it, and nothing else, therefore, if you were looking for something in particular, a search of Napster was always your best bet. Now if you were looking for something, chances are, if it's not on Napster, it's on Gnutella, or Freenet, or . . . etc.
Same thing happens with Online auctions. People were afraid to go to other auction houses, because Ebay had THE name. Therefore, they retain most of the business. Mindshare. It's all about mindshare.
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
They've put a lot of thought into this system. A million years or so ago I was sysop of a BBS. You had to prevent people from doing nothing but leeching or they'd tie up your phone lines and prevent other people from positively affecting your board. So Ratios had to be in place. You had to give people a default number of credits or they'd never stick around long enough to contribute. However, if you gave too many away, people
d just d/l your best stuff and disappear. You had to make things convienent for people who wanted to contribute, and inconcienent for those who wanted to leech. The concept of Mojo is a great step in that direction.
You give a little, you get to take a little. You give a lot, you get to take a lot. Rinse. Repeat.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
Short answer: people who try to make money selling bandwidth will have to pay full price for it in the first place.
As System Administrator and part owner of Got.net, I can say we will not wig out. It's true that part of our niche is over-selling or aggregating our resources: bandwidth, phone lines, modems, disk space. We operate in a similiar way to how banks do. Banks loan out about five times as much money as they have on hand. This ratio is maintained by the government. I think it's called the "prime lending rate" or something.
ISPs sell about 10 times as many dialups as they have modems, and likewise with bandwidth. It's true that if all our nailed-up customers used all their bandwidth we'd be in trouble. However, that doesn't mean we're going to charge EVERYONE more.
We buy bandwidth from our provider under a contract which provides us a minimum committed data rate, and if the lowest 95% of our traffic is over that, we are charged for our overage. We can burst our connection in San Jose at 100Mbps, but as long as 95% of our traffic is under 6Mbps, we won't have any surprises on our bill.
If one of our co-location customers uses a consistantly high amount of bandwidth, we will pass our increased costs on to that customer. If they are doing it to gain Mojo, they will probably want to sell that mojo (maybe to us?). In other words, it's the micro-payments within MojoNation that make it viable. Whereas Napster just drags down a network, prompting private and public institutions to try to block it, an increase in MojoNation traffic is accompanied with an increase in Mojo, and therefore a means for compensating all parties effected.
Most likely, as an ISP, we will be one of the early adoptors and pushers of MojoNation. It will allow us to sell bandwidth and disk space we haven't committed to our official customers yet, which will decrease waste within our company. If our MojoNation agents use too much CPU or disk space, we'll just increase our agent pricing.