Centralized credit server. This way we could monitor, spot, prevent and/or respond to fakes.

peace

By rewarding the people who upload more, however those people manage to do it, even if it’s unfair (LIFE isn’t fair), ratio-based trackers make the whole system work better for EVERYONE.

People are unequal, yes, but that’s not because a capitalist came by and waved a wand and made it so. THAT’S THE WAY IT IS. GET USED TO IT.

If you’re willing to face reality, you’ll realize that this isn’t the political argument you think it is. I suggest you read a book on economics sometime. Fascinating stuff.

the ratio can be demonstrated to suppress the proliferation of the protocol, reduce potential and nominal swarm sizes, and procreate injustice in the system because not all bandwidth users are created equal

there are better ways to hedge externalities e.g. education, community participation, and system rewarding quality targets (full descriptions, upload frequency, seed to completion rate)

the ratio is a cheap and dirty way to encourage filesharing, and in the end it does more damage than good by limiting the filesharing that happens. the bandwidth currency idea is grown from the ratio. and what inevitably follows a currency? taxs

for now, i leave it for the next man to describe the effect taxation has on an open market. Harvard’s approach is as you would expect from a capitalist business school, is this project perchance somebody’s phd thesis?

regardless, it is great positive step for the protocol when an institution as august as Harvard comes onboard, bodes well for our future

h33t dot com where filesharing is an education

Sounds like a good idea to me

Taking a release from just 3 days ago, a private site has 409 seeders with 29 leechers. A well known public site has 191 seeders and 203 leechers.
The private site has had 1969 downloads and the public 217.

The private site gets the file to more people, faster.

There’s also files still around on the private site from june 06 with 30-60 seeders.
A popular trilogy from july 1st 06 on a private site has 45 seeds, the same from the public site on december 23rd 06 has 23 seeds.

The private site can continue to get files out with more seeds over a year later.

Of course, we could argue distribution of linux ISOs, but then linux isn’t distributed on any private site I know of.

As for whether ratio is meant to be tracked or not, uploaded and downloaded are part of bittorrent.
Either they are there for a reason, or your protocol has completely useless parts (providing of course you really are bram).

The only reason each peer needs to report how much is uploaded/downloaded is so the tracker has a record of it. It’s certainly not information that has any bearing on the sharing between peers, which rely on their own tit for tat methods.

Either BT is flawed, or ratio tracking is built in and should not be complained about.

One final point. I’ve run a private site for more than 2 years now, and I’ve never once sold upload credit.
But, sales of upload credit are not sales of the users bandwidth to themselves.

Upload credit is used as a currency on private sites, and rarely ever is the total upload credit in the site defined solely by the amount that was actually uploaded.
Extra credit has to be injected into the system to allow it to function properly, as an exactly equal upload/download amount across the site will lead to a stalemate where nobody downloads.
Giving credit to those who donate is only one way of breaking the stalemate.

Many sites have contests running with a credit reward, or will award users who help in other ways with extra credit. Some give credit to all users on a regular basis.

Upload credit does not purely represent a users upload, nor does it mean a user has either uploaded bytes or donated.

Perhaps your criticism should be directed at those who use donations for their own personal gain, rather than any site that rewards those helping to keep the site alive.
I’m pretty sure you had to give your investors some kind of incentive :P