Slashdot Mirror
Internet Bandwidth to Become a Global Currency?
ClimateCrisis writes to tell us that internet bandwidth could become a global currency under a new model of e-commerce developed by researchers from Delft University of Technology, Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam and Harvard's School of Engineering and Applied Sciences. "The application, available for free download at http://TV.seas.harvard.edu, is an enhanced version of a program called Tribler, originally created by the Dutch collaborators to study video file sharing. 'Successful peer-to-peer systems rely on designing rules that promote fair sharing of resources amongst users. Thus, they are both efficient and powerful computational and economic systems,' David Parkes, John L. Loeb Associate Professor of the Natural Sciences at Harvard said. 'Peer-to-peer has received a bad rap, however, because of its frequent association with illegal music or software downloads.' The researchers were inspired to use a version of the Tribler video sharing software as a model for an e-commerce system because of such flexibility, speed, and reliability."
As long as our ISP's stop capping our ilimited bandwitch, yeah.
Oh wait..it will be.
How can a peer to peer system running in your house provide bandwidth to anyone else? You are a bandwidth sink... you're not part of a route to anywhere (for good reason). Any files sent to or "through" your house have to travel down your internet connection and then go right out the same line. Thus, this becomes the stupidest thing I heard of today.
Iran and Iraq dropped the American Currency for oil purchases
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
One of the requirements of money is that it is standardised across the economy. Internet bandwidth fails at so many points here, and that isn't the only problem.c teristics
See:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Money#Economic_chara
Will people horde it underground? Will I be able to trade ETFs of it on the NYSE? Will the federal reserve bank be responsible for limiting the number of fibers laid in order to curb inflation?
Slightly OT: It always seemed ridiculous to me how people hoard metals underground waiting for global currency collapse, as if the they expect the demand for jewelry to go up a thousand-fold the day after world-wide economic apocalypse. Gold doesn't do anything but look kinda neat and conduct OK, you freaks! We spent all that effort mining the gold, and then we put 95% of it back underground intentionally!
A slashdotter who didn't build his own computer is like a Jedi who didn't build his own lightsaber.
They can use all the '0's they want as long as the '1's are backed with gold.
Did not Enron do it already. Look how good it worked for them.
If you ever watch the Documentry or read the book "The smartest guys in the room", you'll see that ENRON was trying to commoditize everything.
I think they wanted to try that with comsumer broad band, treating it like electricty.
Different rates for different times of day etc.
I could be wrong, I'm reciting this from memory
Anyway, my point is look at Enron now...
Shameless plug alert: Game server control panel
Queue the apocalypse jokes.
I am a bit wary of 'bandwidth trading' even since Enron: "Enron grew wealthy, it claimed, through its pioneering, marketing and promotion of power and communications bandwidth commodities". What ever came of Enron? I don't remember....
I judt got a nre Kinesis keybiartf so please excusr ant egregiou typos.
This is the same thing that brought Enron down. Well, that and causing power plants in Cali to go tits up to greatly increase the price of electricity.
Prof. Farnsworth - "Oh a lesson in not changing history from Mr I'm-My-Own-Grandpa!"
Then the US is already so far behind that we're the Poor Man of Europe.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
They are proposing earn-and-spend market model, where the more a user uploads now and the higher the quality of the contributions, the more she would be able to download later and the faster the download speed.
Hey, what gives? The proposed model only allows for women to have future-money! Do these universities think we're stupid or something?!
I guess when you shoot down a posting on slashdot by mentioning Enron, you get a low score.
I mean, c'mon, that was the first thing I thought of too.
Sheesh.
1. Write an article and give it a sensational headline.
2. Post on slashdot
3. Link to a program with the option to download.
4. ?????
5. Profit!!!
Indeed. Bandwidth may be a commodity, for instance, but in no way can it be a 'currency'.
Mark Twain: "If you call a tail a leg, how many legs does a dog have? Four. Calling a tail a leg doesn't make it one."
The advantage of currency is that it allows getting past the inefficient mechanism of barter. Bandwidth can be bartered, but it can't be stored, for instance. Unused bandwidth is forever wasted. The only way to prevent it being wasted is for someone to use it.
Professional Wild-Eyed Visionary
Just junk food for thought...
Illegal music? Dude, if I could buy music that was illegal, I would do it in a heartbeat. Illegal music must rock hard! It would be like Conway Twitty singing Motorhead songs backed up by the corpses of Dimebag Darrell and John Bonham. Unfortunately, the labels just put out crap.
Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government.
Video download services (legal or illegal) have been looking at P2P to reduce costs. The problem is that most consumers' broadband connections are highly asymmetrical. In my country, 20 Mb/s down connections are common, but upload speeds are only 1 Mb/s.
;)
So a commercial P2P-based video download service has only four options:
a. do nothing and let speeds suffer - which is not accceptable to consumers;
b. reduce the picture quality - which would not be competitive with YouTube (low quality but free) and next-generation DVDs (much better quality and not that expensive);
c. provide the missing 19 Mb/s at their own expense - which is not financially acceptable to the company;
d. find a way to force consumers to upload for 20 times as long as they download.
Since the consumer's upstream bandwidth is such a hot commodity (everyone wants to use it, but it's limited), the video download service cannot assume that it'll be able to make use of theoretical full upload speeds. Too bad, since its very profitability depends on consumers' share ratios.
So the only possible way to get decent quality and decent speeds at a decent cost is to pay uploaders for connections. That way, they will actively choose to allocate their upstream bandwidth to the company, instead of to a competitor. Of course, this implies that the protocol is robust enough to withstand the fraud attempts that are obviously going to happen.
Such a system also has the benefit of solving the ISP / net neutrality threat. If such a system allows ISPs to set up proxies for profit, they'll make sure consumers' get maximal speeds, instead of killing the quality of service and turning the store's customers away.
(This would be option c) outlined above, except the ISP is doing it.)
Warning, shameless plug ahead:
Coincidentally, my brother and I have developed a BitTorrent extension that does just that. We originally intended to go live in a few days, but hell, here goes:
http://developer.snowballnetworks.com
Developers are welcome. And paid. Anonymous posting has been disabled, so drop us an email at developers TA snowballnetworks.com to get an account.
Enron tried doing this, although I have no idea if what they were doing had any technical merit or whether they were selling hot air.
Still, it's a good idea. If I have a file I want to distribute but no bandwidth to do it, I could pay for other people to download my file and distribute it for me via P2P.
The problem is that the p2p client is going to have to track who serves your file and how many times, and clients can't be trusted. It's always going to be vulnerable to hacking and gaming.
If moderation could change anything, it would be illegal.
If I'm being a troll forgive me, but how can bandwidth be currency? Isn't the whole basis of economics scarcity? Won't bandwidth eventually become basically infinite it grows to the point when we could saturate all 5 senses with data? We already passed audio (you can download audio in better quality than your ears faster than you can listen to it). Video is coming up. The rest is just a matter of time.
It's Delft, not Delt. Delft's an engineering school, if I remember.
You are a bandwidth sink... you're not part of a route to anywhere (for good reason). Any files sent to or "through" your house have to travel down your internet connection and then go right out the same line.
In a world of ends, one nowhere is as good as another.
The files sent to my house may indeed pass by my neighbors or you but not when they want them. You will have to give me something to make them available to you again. That something might be to store a little on your own. The combined bandwith of thousands of machines is far greater than any "source" site can deliver.
The unit used in trades like this is often called currency. It is a universally agreed on store of value, like gold. Each person may value the currency more or less but all know that others value.
The short version: your leet files make my wife happy.
DMCA, Hollings, Palladium. What might have sounded like paranoia is now common sense.
And trade with money is just barter by another name. I agree that bandwidth doesn't make a particularly good currency.
Deleted
any internets I get from posting anything full of win are now actually worth something?
I'm more concerned with physics 101 and TCP/IP 101 which tell you there's no such thing as an unlimited network. If the ISP didn't cap you, the above two would?*
*I suppose all the affected people would "cap" you too? Just not in as nice a manner.
A message from the Tribler researchers...:
Download of the software
Planned next features and documentation
Browse the Python code (LGPL)
SVN repository
Scientific paper on Give-to-Get algorithm
Please post any question you have and we will reply asap.
It's Delft University of Technology, not Delt as the summary reads.
One of the requirements of money is that it is standardised across the economy.
There is no such thing as a standard store of value because each person has their own tastes. All that is really required is that everyone knows that others think the thing has value, which is why sea shells, gold and other useless things will do.
There's some sophistry going on here in calling the thing of value, "bandwith". What actually has value is the thing conveyed. That invites all sorts of idiotic comment from copyright warriors who still get their information from paper and other difficult places. Bandwith that has nothing at the end of it is worthless. Bandwith that ends at my hard drive might have something you want that can't be delivered by the creator without help. I might let you have it if you let me have something in return. That is a trade of stored value and it can motivate people to do things.
Of course, just like real currency, bandwith currency only works where there's freedom. If you and I are not free to trade things of value, neither of us will get what we want. We all live with fiat currency, and bandwith will be suppressed as surely as gold and precious metals are. Governments will not allow you to have a free store of value because fiat currency represents a substantial tax they are unwilling to give up.
DMCA, Hollings, Palladium. What might have sounded like paranoia is now common sense.
in case these folks don't remember that
I'll be paying for my mercedes in bandwidth. Ok sir, that will be 600GB. Here you go.
They're using their grammar skills there.
Makes sense to me, so long as I can pay my Internet bill with my illegal downloads.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
Isn't this what Enron attempted to do (to some extent)? Didn't they run an arbitrage exchange over dark fibre and potential bandwidth? If I remember correctly, Enron did not end up as a model of corporate ethics, innovation (except accounting practices) or good sense.
One ring to bind them - should probably have more fiber and less rings in their diet.
Actually, the most successful p2p system, bit torrent, has little that promotes fair sharing. That is, in my opinion, one of the reasons it is so successful. It is more communist, and less capitalist; exactly the opposite of the article implies.
Not making sure everything is "fair", but rather giving away freely has less overhead, and is great for when the resources, in this case bandwidth, are in abundance.
Write your own Choose Your Own Adventure. http://www.freegameengines.org/gamebook-engine/
...and contract specs? Come back to me when you have a liquid contract traded on a regulated exchange before you talk about "global" anything. Don't start calling it a currency either. If it is to be truly global, could we see futures such as December Bandwidth (BNZ9 @ Globex)?
So much for all the spice I've been stockpiling... :(
Gives that old t-shirt a new significance.
In my country, 20 Mb/s down connections are common, but upload speeds are only 1 Mb/s.
In my country, 1.5 Mb/s down connections are common, but upload speeds are only 30 Kb/s.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
Bram got his start there:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mojonation