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."

Comments

Re:Bandwitch limited

[Radon360]

But their benevolent action of capping it is to keep you from flooding the market and devaluing it...and thus crashing this new market and making your bandwidth worthless. You see, economics 101.

<grin>

bandwidth currency?

[Lord Ender]

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!

Re:bandwidth currency?

[ichigo 2.0]

Energy would be a much better currency than gold, but how would you use it in trade? And what about energy losses? Inflation of paper currency is already bad enough, but now we would have to start worrying about our money literally disappearing into thin air. The reason gold is popular as an alternative is its rarity and ease of storage. You don't need tons of it to buy a house, but you would need a lot of batteries to do the same.

Re:Doesn't make any sense...

[n3m6]

It makes sense if you use this in the context of torrents. Sites like demonoid already requires you to upload as much as you download. In other words, exchange of your bandwidth(upload) for content.

Didn't ENRON try that?

[xgr3gx]

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...

Re:Didn't ENRON try that?

[khallow]

And if you actually understood what Enron did, you'd know that the commodization wasn't the problem. As another poster notes, it's the manipulation of shoddily regulated markets, corruption, book cooking, and some of the stupidest scams to ever involve business. Eg, a $3 billion electricity plant in India (the scam was that the state government there would cough up some ridiculous amount of money per month, but it got blocked easily by the courts) and a further billion in dark fiber. When done sanely, commodization makes a lot of sense and internet bandwidth looks like a good candidate to me.

ENRON anyone?

[SengirV]

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.

Paying for uploads is the only way P2P can work

[killbill!]

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. ;)

Exact opposite of what has been working well.

[WK2]

Successful peer-to-peer systems rely on designing rules that promote fair sharing of resources amongst users.

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.

Re:Exact opposite of what has been working well.

[Anonymous Coward]

Not quite. BitTorrent had the "tit for tat" functionality from the start, which does a rough approximation of this idea on a fairly fine-grained basis; if you send, you're much more likely to be the recipient of the available capacity. It breaks down when your peer doesn't have metrics for how productive you are. Seeds can only tell how much you download, so they send pretty much randomly.

BT wasn't first either, of course. If I recall correctly edonkey had a ticket system to do the same thing, allocating each new peer a few tickets to get exchange started. The significant difference in BT is that the tit for tat system is not centralized, nor even part of the protocol - it's only part of the peers' choking logic and collects data passively.