I'll be there, giving a presentation on a subject dear to the hearts of slashdotters: how to find the good stuff amidst the bad stuff, even when some of the moderators are malicious.
Mojo Nation runs on Linux/x86, Windows 95, Windows 98, Windows ME, Windows NT, Windows 2000, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD, Irix, Linux/Alpha, Linux/PPC, Linux/Sparc, and MacOS X. It is written in Python, with the performance-intensive parts and the standard open-source libraries written in C or C++. Last I checked, Java 2 still isn't available for FreeBSD, not to mention all the other platforms.
I hate to fan the flames of language holywars, and I don't think that Python, C, or C++ are the be-all and end-all of programming languages, but this "Java == portability" myth is starting to bug me. Currently, I would only choose Java for portability if I were aiming at the various embedded systems out there, and even then I would probably end up going with C or embedded C++.
I do appreciate the difference between recompiling versus shipping byte-code, but most of the actual program logic in Mojo Nation is in (Python) byte-code. And anyway, for a "download, install and run" application, the only cost of having platform-specific compilation is that users have to click on the correct hyperlink on our download page.
Any game can be made into a zero-sum game by specifying that whoever does "best" is the winner and everyone else is a loser.
Any game that includes "points" which are themselves non-zero-sum can be made into a non-zero-sum game by changing the "goal" from being "getting more points than the other people" to "getting the most points that you can".
For example, play a game where various players or teams get points, but one team getting points does not imply another team losing points. Now say that it doesn't matter who has the most points -- the only thing that matters is that after the game, you get one chocolate chip cookie for every 10 points you have.
Okay, so it helps if there are "moves" or "strategies" in the game in which both players can gain points by "cooperating".
Have you tried a side-by-side comparison of Mojo Nation and Gnutella? I haven't, but I would love to see the results. Mojo Nation is really pretty good.
Regards,
Zooko, who is off to run "apt-cache search gnutella"
P.S. Don't forget to read Evil Overlord Jim McCoy's response to the Shirky article. Judging by Shirky's later article, I would say that Jim scored some serious points and got Shirky to think again. (Not that Shirky blessed the Mojo Nation concept of integrated micropayments -- oh no... But he did start thinking more deeply about how different resources have different scarcity characteristics, which was one of our points in our response.)
You'll be glad to know that we stopped requiring the weird proxy configurations a couple of versions ago. To run the new version is simply: "tar -xzf./mojonation-*.tar.gz ;./mojonation/evil/Broker --no-tail ; netscape./.mojonation/broker/intropage.html".
The windows version is apparently even easier to install -- it has some kind of gui point-and-drool installer that untars and executes these things for you, or something.;-)
We also recently fixed several really nasty "distributed bugs", which didn't show up at all on any particular broker, but which caused the entire network to degrade. Nowadays Mojo Nation is much faster and more robust than it was last time you tried it.
Debian's philosophy includes that every package must be open source. You won't find Netscape there...
This is misleading. The Debian maintainers put non-free software under a different "category" heading in their package lists, but in practice this makes zero difference. If you have Debian installed and you want to install netscape, you type sudo apt-get install netscape, wait for it to download the appropriate packages and any library packages that are required, and wait for it to automatically install and configure, and then you can type netscape, and you are looking at the netscape splash page.
The Debian people may philosophically prefer free software over Netscape, but in practice it is faster and easier to install netscape on Debian than on any other distribution.
I'm presenting a talk at the O'Reilly p2p conference entitled "Attack Resistant Sharing of Metadata".
It's based on an idea of Raph Levien's, somewhat similar to the Advogato trust metric. Basically, you only trust meta-data from your friends, or from people whose meta-data has been good in the past, and then to a lesser extent you trust their friends, but you dynamically adapt if someone starts distributing bad meta-data. We can't really prove that it will work, but it has some promising characteristics.
We are going to implement it on top of Mojo Nation.
Mojo Nation provides a content-distribution service with integrated micropayments.
Right now, our beta network is just a proof of technology -- you can publish and download content and Mojo keeps track of who is contributing bandwidth and disk space to the network. In the future, however, Mojo could be used to remunerate the actual artists who create the content.
Mojo Nation is an open source project. Check it out!
Looks to me like it is still in beta. I strongly doubt that we would have more platforms if we had used Java.
This is not even counting the fact that we developed faster in Python than we would have in Java (I say this based on spending one year working full-time on a Java app and getting basically nothing shippable, and then spending one year working in Python and getting, well, Mojo Nation.) (Not, obviously, that I wrote Mojo Nation all by myself, but the point remains that I've seen Python apps come together way faster than Java apps.)
And this isn't counting the fact that the standard libraries that we used are in C/C++ and are very mature and widely supported than their Java equivalents. Don't get me wrong, I love Cryptix, not only because it was founded by some friends of mine, but because it enables cool tricks like hushmail , but it would've been dog slow to do our crypto in pure Java. The crypto library we use, Wei Dai's Crypto++ is about as fast as can possibly be (including hand-optimized assembly inner loops, if you are on x86). I know you can marry Java app code to native code (and I have done so, way back in the dark ages of Java 1), but the culture of Java frowns on this, whereas the culture of Python has fully embraced native-code integration from day one. Perhaps as a consequence of this, it seems easier to do in Python.
As to your comments about UI, I have to defer to your authority as a user. Personally, I like the HTML UI, and I would much rather have an HTML UI than an actual widget UI, but apparently most users in this world disagree, so you are right -- we should provide the latter.
To bring this conversation back to the topic at hand, has this argument been productive or destructive? I think that it has been useful to talk about the actual features offered by different languages / tools. It is good for programmers to learn from the experience of others. I do not think that Python is Good and Java is Bad. Java has several good features, such as integration with current browsers (allowing cool tricks like hushmail) and possibly good cross-platform UI (although I don't personally know how Swing compares to wxPython), and it has a security model that allows untrusted code, but cross-platform availability and rapid development are not among Java's strengths.
I especially liked the point at the end, that languages do have strengths and weaknesses and are not all created equal.
I firmly believe that we hackers at Evil Geniuses For A Better Tomorrow could not have implemented Mojo Nation as quickly as we did if we had been using Java instead of Python.
Nonetheless, Mark-Jason Dominus is exactly right that tribalism is not a sane or effective way to grow, as a professional or as an industry. Developers and users of other programming languages are not our enemies, they are our friends.
The Apple Newton keyboard (if you can get one) is excellent. It is so small that you can fit it into one of your thigh pockets if you wear army surplus pants, but I swear it felt like it was full-size when you typed on it. (In fact, maybe it did have full-size keys -- I'm not sure. It was completely usable for diary entries, class notes, and even extended coding sessions.
The Newton was never a "PDA" like the Palm Pilot -- it was more like a very small laptop in terms of what you used it for. No matter how much you like your Palm Pilot, you do not spend 4 hours on an airplane writing source code and e-mail in it. I did that with my Newton.
I'm still looking forward to a new handheld that is as usable as the Newton...
Ian: actually I think we are on the same side. We intend for Mojo Nation to provide people with free speech, and we intend for Mojo Nation to be globally scalable, just as you intend for Mojo Nation.
The only reason Mojo Nation was launched as a separate project is because the founders believed that an anarchic system could never scale without integrated microcurrency to solve the Tragedy of the Commons.
I would rather discuss how Freenet and Mojo Nation can cooperate than how they can compete, at this stage. We are both open source projects with the same goals, and the whole point is to share information between peers, so it seems natural to link the two networks together.
If you'd like to talk, e-mail me at "zooko@mad-scientist.com".
If the resource is popular then it gets mirrored automatically by greedy block servers who are hoping to sell copies in return for Mojo to people that download it. (Note that you earn Mojo by running a Mojo Nation client, so it is more like "trading" your bandwidth and your disk space and the blocks you've collected for the blocks that the other guy has collected.)
So as far as I can tell, mirroring useful web resources that a large community uses is a perfect use for Mojo Nation. I wouldn't recommend depending solely on Mojo Nation at this point (BETA! BETA! It's the letter that comes before Gamma which is the kind of radiation that made Spiderman and The Incredible Hulk!), but I would recommend experimenting: take a web site that you are mirroring, do a `wget -r -k' on it, then run the Mojo Nation utility "cmdpub" on the resulting directory.
We know that the install process and documentation need to be fixed up. The reason we haven't done so yet is because there are only a handful of hackers working on Mojo Nation and we have been busy fixing up other more pressing issues like the aforementioned slow download problem.
Our next priority is making a new improved install process and making it easier to use.
By the way, if you could send e-mail to support@mojonation.net or mojonation-users@lists.sourceforge.net telling us specifically what was impossible without reading the manual, that would help.
Mojo Nation is an open source project. This doesn't mean you can't complain about it (I hate it when people say that you aren't allowed to complain about open source projects just because they are open source.), but it does mean that if you submit a patch that corrects the documentation or auto-configures the browser proxy or whatever, we will gratefully accept the patch and put your name in the CREDITS file, where it will be praised eternally by generations of grateful Mojo Net users.
Bram and Greg and Drue hacked faster download and upload, and the latest version is substantially faster (especially noticeable on larger files). Give it a try and let me know (zooko@mad-scientist.com) if you are still unsatisfied.
It definitely works on RedHat and Debian. You might have gotten a screwed up RedHat build that I accidentally posted last week. It was only up for 10 minutes... Anyway, e-mail me if it doesn't work. There's no reason for it not to run on any Linux bux.
You can post your web sites on Mojo Nation (warning: this is in beta! It is not stable, but it works.). Documents posted to Mojo Nation are not deletable. (This is due to some complicated peer to peer architecture and RAID-like splitting of the data into multiple redundant shares, of which you need only a subset to reconstruct the original document. See the web site for docs.)
Mojo Nation is a distributed file sharing system, but we (the Evil Geniuses For A Better Tomorrow) plan to make it into a full distributed computation system next. It features integrated micropayments so you can get paid per CPU cycle that you donate.
Probably in the future we will ask for some demographic info like age, country, operating system, timezone or whatever in order to get an idea what sort of features we should add to benefit the most users, but at that time, we'll certainly have a good privacy policy.
Mojo Nation was formed by a bunch of cypherpunks so be assured that we will take privacy issues very seriously. (In fact, the architecture that we've already designed and deployed has full strength crypto and privacy-friendly features integrated throughout.)
We wrote Mojo Nation entirely in Python, except for the performance-intensive parts like Crypto and low-level database, which are standard C/C++ libraries wrapped in Python interfaces.
Check out openpatents.org. You get actual real patents on ideas, and then give openpatents.org a grant, saying that anyone can use your patent, provided that any other patents that he owns are also contributed to openpatents.org.
I like PayPal because it has millions of users. The only worrisome thing about PayPal is: what is their business model? Right now they are buying marketshare with their $5 giveaways, and they are also suffering the costs of being based on credit cards, but they are not passing on those costs to their users. I hope they have a good plan for going profitable without losing their attractive features. Also PayPal is specifically disinterested in anonymity, which is a very interesting feature to me.
But in the meantime I love PayPay because they have millions of users and they are a peer-to-peer payment system, so there is nothing to stop PayPal users from using PayPal to buy another currency like e-gold or Mojo.:-)
E-gold, I like because it has been around a long time, it is peer-to-peer, allows micropayments, and it is dead simple technically. (That's a feature!)
Also, the e-gold company really sets a high standard for being in-the-open about their business, including the automatically generated, WWW-accessible auditing information on this page. E-gold doesn't smell of that tricky e-business baloney about living off of gullible venture capitalists until that glorious day when they dominate the market and then they'll somehow figure out how to extract a tithe from their customers.
I really hope that the e-gold on-line statistics page is the forerunner of the next generation of auditing technology.
Now Mojo Nation I like because it allows really small micropayments ("nano-payments"?), and it can be unconditionally anonymous in the Chaumian sense (although the current version doesn't use that feature since we don't have a license to use Chaum's patent), and it is integrated into the Mojo Nation globally distributed data haven.
Oh yeah, and I because I helped write it.:-)
Mojo Nation is not yet at version 1.0 -- the next version that comes out will be 0.9 -- so it still has performance issues and bugs. You'll hear about it when 1.0 comes out, believe me.:-)
In sum, each of these payment systems have unique features, and I hope that we can link them all together to make the overall digital economy bigger and more fluid. I know that there are already several independent market-makers who will buy or sell e-gold in exchange for other kinds of money. E-gold is older than PayPal and the e-gold company encourages such people and gives them publicity on e-gold.com and so forth.
Actually Raph, we just added a "handicapper" method that says that you always prefer to do business with yourself than with anyone else. (This makes a lot of sense. You have the lowest latency to yourself, and the highest reliability, and the lowest price: 0!)
One consequence of that is that when you go to publish blocks, you probably publish some of them to your own block server (assuming you are running a block server), and then other block servers will come buy the blocks from you. So you might be able to earn Mojo for publishing.
Of course, there are large unsolved problems here, as you are well aware. In the long run we want a decentralized system to rate content in a way that is resilient to fraud at the system-wide level. Mojo Nation as it exists now should be at least as good as the alternatives, but I also hope to make it the best possible substrate on which to build such futuristic human-networking protocols.
Regards,
Zooko
Chief Hunchback, Evil Geniuses For A Better Tomorrow
Slashdot Mirror
I'll be there, giving a presentation on a subject dear to the hearts of slashdotters: how to find the good stuff amidst the bad stuff, even when some of the moderators are malicious.
Of course, my real goal will be to find out how other p2p systems work in order to use the knowledge to improve Mojo Nation. Therefore one of the talks I'm most looking forward to is Wes Felter's overview of technical decisions in the deployed p2p networks.
Regards
Zooko
Mojo Nation runs on Linux/x86, Windows 95, Windows 98, Windows ME, Windows NT, Windows 2000, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD, Irix, Linux/Alpha, Linux/PPC, Linux/Sparc, and MacOS X. It is written in Python, with the performance-intensive parts and the standard open-source libraries written in C or C++. Last I checked, Java 2 still isn't available for FreeBSD, not to mention all the other platforms.
I hate to fan the flames of language holywars, and I don't think that Python, C, or C++ are the be-all and end-all of programming languages, but this "Java == portability" myth is starting to bug me. Currently, I would only choose Java for portability if I were aiming at the various embedded systems out there, and even then I would probably end up going with C or embedded C++.
I do appreciate the difference between recompiling versus shipping byte-code, but most of the actual program logic in Mojo Nation is in (Python) byte-code. And anyway, for a "download, install and run" application, the only cost of having platform-specific compilation is that users have to click on the correct hyperlink on our download page.
Regards,
Zooko
Any game can be made into a zero-sum game by specifying that whoever does "best" is the winner and everyone else is a loser.
Any game that includes "points" which are themselves non-zero-sum can be made into a non-zero-sum game by changing the "goal" from being "getting more points than the other people" to "getting the most points that you can".
For example, play a game where various players or teams get points, but one team getting points does not imply another team losing points. Now say that it doesn't matter who has the most points -- the only thing that matters is that after the game, you get one chocolate chip cookie for every 10 points you have.
Okay, so it helps if there are "moves" or "strategies" in the game in which both players can gain points by "cooperating".
Regards,
Zooko
Have you tried a side-by-side comparison of Mojo Nation and Gnutella? I haven't, but I would love to see the results. Mojo Nation is really pretty good.
Regards,
Zooko, who is off to run "apt-cache search gnutella"
P.S. Don't forget to read Evil Overlord Jim McCoy's response to the Shirky article. Judging by Shirky's later article, I would say that Jim scored some serious points and got Shirky to think again. (Not that Shirky blessed the Mojo Nation concept of integrated micropayments -- oh no... But he did start thinking more deeply about how different resources have different scarcity characteristics, which was one of our points in our response.)
You'll be glad to know that we stopped requiring the weird proxy configurations a couple of versions ago. To run the new version is simply: "tar -xzf ./mojonation-*.tar.gz ; ./mojonation/evil/Broker --no-tail ; netscape ./.mojonation/broker/intropage.html".
The windows version is apparently even easier to install -- it has some kind of gui point-and-drool installer that untars and executes these things for you, or something. ;-)
We also recently fixed several really nasty "distributed bugs", which didn't show up at all on any particular broker, but which caused the entire network to degrade. Nowadays Mojo Nation is much faster and more robust than it was last time you tried it.
Regards,
Zooko
This is misleading. The Debian maintainers put non-free software under a different "category" heading in their package lists, but in practice this makes zero difference. If you have Debian installed and you want to install netscape, you type sudo apt-get install netscape, wait for it to download the appropriate packages and any library packages that are required, and wait for it to automatically install and configure, and then you can type netscape, and you are looking at the netscape splash page.
The Debian people may philosophically prefer free software over Netscape, but in practice it is faster and easier to install netscape on Debian than on any other distribution.
Regards,
Zooko
I'm presenting a talk at the O'Reilly p2p conference entitled "Attack Resistant Sharing of Metadata".
It's based on an idea of Raph Levien's, somewhat similar to the Advogato trust metric. Basically, you only trust meta-data from your friends, or from people whose meta-data has been good in the past, and then to a lesser extent you trust their friends, but you dynamically adapt if someone starts distributing bad meta-data. We can't really prove that it will work, but it has some promising characteristics.
We are going to implement it on top of Mojo Nation.
Regards,
Zooko
Mojo Nation provides a content-distribution service with integrated micropayments.
Right now, our beta network is just a proof of technology -- you can publish and download content and Mojo keeps track of who is contributing bandwidth and disk space to the network. In the future, however, Mojo could be used to remunerate the actual artists who create the content.
Mojo Nation is an open source project. Check it out!
Zooko
Really? Is Java 2 even available for FreeBSD yet?
Zooko goes to check.
Looks to me like it is still in beta. I strongly doubt that we would have more platforms if we had used Java.
This is not even counting the fact that we developed faster in Python than we would have in Java (I say this based on spending one year working full-time on a Java app and getting basically nothing shippable, and then spending one year working in Python and getting, well, Mojo Nation.) (Not, obviously, that I wrote Mojo Nation all by myself, but the point remains that I've seen Python apps come together way faster than Java apps.)
And this isn't counting the fact that the standard libraries that we used are in C/C++ and are very mature and widely supported than their Java equivalents. Don't get me wrong, I love Cryptix, not only because it was founded by some friends of mine, but because it enables cool tricks like hushmail , but it would've been dog slow to do our crypto in pure Java. The crypto library we use, Wei Dai's Crypto++ is about as fast as can possibly be (including hand-optimized assembly inner loops, if you are on x86). I know you can marry Java app code to native code (and I have done so, way back in the dark ages of Java 1), but the culture of Java frowns on this, whereas the culture of Python has fully embraced native-code integration from day one. Perhaps as a consequence of this, it seems easier to do in Python.
As to your comments about UI, I have to defer to your authority as a user. Personally, I like the HTML UI, and I would much rather have an HTML UI than an actual widget UI, but apparently most users in this world disagree, so you are right -- we should provide the latter.
To bring this conversation back to the topic at hand, has this argument been productive or destructive? I think that it has been useful to talk about the actual features offered by different languages / tools. It is good for programmers to learn from the experience of others. I do not think that Python is Good and Java is Bad. Java has several good features, such as integration with current browsers (allowing cool tricks like hushmail) and possibly good cross-platform UI (although I don't personally know how Swing compares to wxPython), and it has a security model that allows untrusted code, but cross-platform availability and rapid development are not among Java's strengths.
Regards,
Zooko
What an excellent article!
I especially liked the point at the end, that languages do have strengths and weaknesses and are not all created equal.
I firmly believe that we hackers at Evil Geniuses For A Better Tomorrow could not have implemented Mojo Nation as quickly as we did if we had been using Java instead of Python.
Nonetheless, Mark-Jason Dominus is exactly right that tribalism is not a sane or effective way to grow, as a professional or as an industry. Developers and users of other programming languages are not our enemies, they are our friends.
Regards,
Zooko
The Apple Newton keyboard (if you can get one) is excellent. It is so small that you can fit it into one of your thigh pockets if you wear army surplus pants, but I swear it felt like it was full-size when you typed on it. (In fact, maybe it did have full-size keys -- I'm not sure. It was completely usable for diary entries, class notes, and even extended coding sessions.
The Newton was never a "PDA" like the Palm Pilot -- it was more like a very small laptop in terms of what you used it for. No matter how much you like your Palm Pilot, you do not spend 4 hours on an airplane writing source code and e-mail in it. I did that with my Newton.
I'm still looking forward to a new handheld that is as usable as the Newton...
Duh -- obviously I meant to say "just as you intend for Freenet". Sorry!
Zooko
Ian: actually I think we are on the same side. We intend for Mojo Nation to provide people with free speech, and we intend for Mojo Nation to be globally scalable, just as you intend for Mojo Nation.
The only reason Mojo Nation was launched as a separate project is because the founders believed that an anarchic system could never scale without integrated microcurrency to solve the Tragedy of the Commons.
I would rather discuss how Freenet and Mojo Nation can cooperate than how they can compete, at this stage. We are both open source projects with the same goals, and the whole point is to share information between peers, so it seems natural to link the two networks together.
If you'd like to talk, e-mail me at "zooko@mad-scientist.com".
Regards,
Zooko
Evil Geniuses For A Better Tomorrow
If the resource is popular then it gets mirrored automatically by greedy block servers who are hoping to sell copies in return for Mojo to people that download it. (Note that you earn Mojo by running a Mojo Nation client, so it is more like "trading" your bandwidth and your disk space and the blocks you've collected for the blocks that the other guy has collected.)
So as far as I can tell, mirroring useful web resources that a large community uses is a perfect use for Mojo Nation. I wouldn't recommend depending solely on Mojo Nation at this point (BETA! BETA! It's the letter that comes before Gamma which is the kind of radiation that made Spiderman and The Incredible Hulk!), but I would recommend experimenting: take a web site that you are mirroring, do a `wget -r -k' on it, then run the Mojo Nation utility "cmdpub" on the resulting directory.
Regards,
Zooko, Evil Geniuses For A Better Tomorrow
We know that the install process and documentation need to be fixed up. The reason we haven't done so yet is because there are only a handful of hackers working on Mojo Nation and we have been busy fixing up other more pressing issues like the aforementioned slow download problem.
Our next priority is making a new improved install process and making it easier to use.
By the way, if you could send e-mail to support@mojonation.net or mojonation-users@lists.sourceforge.net telling us specifically what was impossible without reading the manual, that would help.
Mojo Nation is an open source project. This doesn't mean you can't complain about it (I hate it when people say that you aren't allowed to complain about open source projects just because they are open source.), but it does mean that if you submit a patch that corrects the documentation or auto-configures the browser proxy or whatever, we will gratefully accept the patch and put your name in the CREDITS file, where it will be praised eternally by generations of grateful Mojo Net users.
Bram and Greg and Drue hacked faster download and upload, and the latest version is substantially faster (especially noticeable on larger files). Give it a try and let me know (zooko@mad-scientist.com) if you are still unsatisfied.
It definitely works on RedHat and Debian. You might have gotten a screwed up RedHat build that I accidentally posted last week. It was only up for 10 minutes... Anyway, e-mail me if it doesn't work. There's no reason for it not to run on any Linux bux.
You can post your web sites on Mojo Nation (warning: this is in beta! It is not stable, but it works.). Documents posted to Mojo Nation are not deletable. (This is due to some complicated peer to peer architecture and RAID-like splitting of the data into multiple redundant shares, of which you need only a subset to reconstruct the original document. See the web site for docs.)
Regards,
Zooko, Evil Geniuses For A Better Tomorrow
Good work, guys! You actually did it! Now it will be possible to make Mojo Nation run over Freedom.
:-)
Regards,
Zooko
Mojo Nation is a distributed file sharing system, but we (the Evil Geniuses For A Better Tomorrow) plan to make it into a full distributed computation system next. It features integrated micropayments so you can get paid per CPU cycle that you donate.
Hi, I'm a hacker for Mojo Nation and I don't think we ever ask you for any personal details.
Just go to our SourceForge page and either grab the .tgz or CVS up.
Probably in the future we will ask for some demographic info like age, country, operating system, timezone or whatever in order to get an idea what sort of features we should add to benefit the most users, but at that time, we'll certainly have a good privacy policy.
Mojo Nation was formed by a bunch of cypherpunks so be assured that we will take privacy issues very seriously. (In fact, the architecture that we've already designed and deployed has full strength crypto and privacy-friendly features integrated throughout.)
Regards,
Zooko
Hacker,
Evil Geniuses For A Better Tomorrow
We wrote Mojo Nation entirely in Python, except for the performance-intensive parts like Crypto and low-level database, which are standard C/C++ libraries wrapped in Python interfaces.
I love Python!
Check out openpatents.org. You get actual real patents on ideas, and then give openpatents.org a grant, saying that anyone can use your patent, provided that any other patents that he owns are also contributed to openpatents.org.
Regards,
Zooko
Chief Hunchback
Evil Geniuses For A Better Tomorrow
I like PayPal because it has millions of users. The only worrisome thing about PayPal is: what is their business model? Right now they are buying marketshare with their $5 giveaways, and they are also suffering the costs of being based on credit cards, but they are not passing on those costs to their users. I hope they have a good plan for going profitable without losing their attractive features. Also PayPal is specifically disinterested in anonymity, which is a very interesting feature to me.
But in the meantime I love PayPay because they have millions of users and they are a peer-to-peer payment system, so there is nothing to stop PayPal users from using PayPal to buy another currency like e-gold or Mojo. :-)
E-gold, I like because it has been around a long time, it is peer-to-peer, allows micropayments, and it is dead simple technically. (That's a feature!)
Also, the e-gold company really sets a high standard for being in-the-open about their business, including the automatically generated, WWW-accessible auditing information on this page. E-gold doesn't smell of that tricky e-business baloney about living off of gullible venture capitalists until that glorious day when they dominate the market and then they'll somehow figure out how to extract a tithe from their customers.
I really hope that the e-gold on-line statistics page is the forerunner of the next generation of auditing technology.
Now Mojo Nation I like because it allows really small micropayments ("nano-payments"?), and it can be unconditionally anonymous in the Chaumian sense (although the current version doesn't use that feature since we don't have a license to use Chaum's patent), and it is integrated into the Mojo Nation globally distributed data haven.
Oh yeah, and I because I helped write it. :-)
Mojo Nation is not yet at version 1.0 -- the next version that comes out will be 0.9 -- so it still has performance issues and bugs. You'll hear about it when 1.0 comes out, believe me. :-)
In sum, each of these payment systems have unique features, and I hope that we can link them all together to make the overall digital economy bigger and more fluid. I know that there are already several independent market-makers who will buy or sell e-gold in exchange for other kinds of money. E-gold is older than PayPal and the e-gold company encourages such people and gives them publicity on e-gold.com and so forth.
Regards,
Zooko
digital money enthusiast
Chief Hunchback, Evil Geniuses For A Better Tomorrow
Actually Raph, we just added a "handicapper" method that says that you always prefer to do business with yourself than with anyone else. (This makes a lot of sense. You have the lowest latency to yourself, and the highest reliability, and the lowest price: 0!)
One consequence of that is that when you go to publish blocks, you probably publish some of them to your own block server (assuming you are running a block server), and then other block servers will come buy the blocks from you. So you might be able to earn Mojo for publishing.
Of course, there are large unsolved problems here, as you are well aware. In the long run we want a decentralized system to rate content in a way that is resilient to fraud at the system-wide level. Mojo Nation as it exists now should be at least as good as the alternatives, but I also hope to make it the best possible substrate on which to build such futuristic human-networking protocols.
Regards,
Zooko
Chief Hunchback, Evil Geniuses For A Better Tomorrow
Freenet rocks.
I wish someone would write a client that speaks both Freenet and Mojo Nation protocols...
There should be "bridge nodes" that speak at least two protocols and that link the various distributed networks together.