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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."
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.
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.
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
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.