From: Michael S. Lorrey (mike@datamann.com)
Date: Thu Mar 02 2000 - 21:29:33 MST
hal@finney.org wrote:
> The way the Freenet system is designed to work, a given document may be
> stored on one or more server nodes. Each node stores a certain number
> of documents, ranked by priority. When a document is fetched, its
> rank is increased and that of all others is lowered. When documents'
> rankings drop below a certain level, they are deleted from the node,
> although pointers are kept to other nodes where they may still be present.
So unpopular opinions or information will be drowned out by the din of
consensus. I guess I misspoke. It should be called PoliticallyCorrectNet.
> This produces a sort of crude "economy", where document requests are
> treated like payment to keep documents present in the system. Documents
> which are requested more often get higher rankings and get replicated on
> multiple servers. Documents which are requested too rarely eventually
> get dropped from the system.
>
> The problem with this kind of system is that there is no method for
> effectively determining the demand for a piece of information. In terms
> of the "economy", document requests are too crude to serve as currency
> because they are too easily "forged".
>
> In the other direction, the system attempts to offer publishing services
> to anyone, without regard for ability to pay. It is in effect a pure
> commons, and since there are no costs to publishers, we can expect that
> the resource will be over-utilized.
>
> So we are likely to see documents flooded into the system, both by
> people trying to wash out the ones they don't like, and by genuine
> users attracted by the free service. People will create request bots
> and cooperative circles in order to keep their documents present (and
> to flush the ones they don't like out of the system).
Given this, I don't think that this will fly due to pure economics. Memory space
is cheap, while bandwidth is expensive. Your system is putting high demands on
your scarce resource while putting low demands on your cheap resource.
> It's a highly unbalanced and fragile system which is unlikely to achieve
> much robustness.
Or much of anything, IMNSHO. Sorry Lee.
> However it could still be a good testbed for the basic mechanisms for
> storing documents, moving them around, and so on. If the ranking system
> were updated to be more reasonable (based on real payments, for example)
> then it could grow into a more stable system.
Payments from whome? Lets see, you could get payments from requestors, in the
form of subscriptions, or you could get your space sponsored, in the form of
either advertisement base broadcasting or public television and radio (though
they are both also taking advertizin these days).
Your system asks for server owners to provide free space to post information,
which is fine, free bulletin boards have been going on since the Roman Empire.
Its your ranking popularity system, and the abusinve traffic that will result,
wasting bandwidth that will be the ruin of this concept.
--
TANSTAAFL!!!
Michael S. Lorrey
Director, Grafton County Fish & Game Assoc.
http://www.lorrey.com/gcfga/
Member, Extropy Institute
http://www.extropy.org
Member, National Rifle Association
http://www.nra.org
"Live Free or Die, Death is not the Worst of Evils."
- General John Stark
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