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

Inherently not a 'currency'

[Doug Merritt]

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.

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.