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

if i was anti-p2p i would set up a private site, invent the ratio, log my members and sell them to the **AA to collect dividends on legal threats

filesharing is NOT about currency of any kind. it is about participation and the small world connection. a bittorrent site is a node which brings people together in a uniquely economic sharing environment

bandwidth is such an unequal thing, only a capitalist could imagine to cash it in

ratio is what keeps bittorrent from proliferating. somebody said above there are a lot of stupid admins, yes there are. there are also a lot of anti-p2p admins

h33t dot com where filesharing is an education

” * Q2: What is the difference between the two download versions?

If you select the left download version, the Tribler client will upload as much as it downloads. This version is “balanced” in the sense that for every piece that you want to download you also have to upload a piece of the same size. If you select the right download version, the Tribler client will optimize the file sharing algorithm to speed up your downloads, minimizing your upload to others. While this improves the speed of your personal video downloads, other users will not be able to benefit from your videos as much as with the left version which then consequently reduces their download speed.”

http://tv.seas.harvard.edu/faq.php

Why wouldn’t everyone choose the one on the right side?

http://tv.seas.harvard.edu/

This could be a valuable model to follow for pay sites as an alternative to hosting on servers.

Don’t charge by type of media, charge by ratio of download to upload.

Obscure but quality media is more expensive, unless it’s popularity explodes. Then as a sharer, you recoup losses as you upload. The more you upload the more you recoup.

Early new single Britney Spears sharers will rake it in as long as they share, but the bulk of people will pay relatively the same amount, with the stragglers having to pay a little bit more, unless there’s a new surge in popularity after others have pulled Brittney from the share list.

The system feeds the viral wave.

That’s basically a description of super seeding mode (as seen in Azureus) right there. The original uploader keeps a record of which peers got which pieces, and once those pieces start to propagate among other leeches the ones with the best apparent share ratios get higher priority on the next round of fresh bits.

As long as these guys aren’t going to use this system in an ultra-capitalistic way (and even then, they could get people to pay real money for extra download speed), I could see this thing working.

The share ratio measures not only a seeder’s potential for upstream, but also their altruistic nature. If you have a gigabit upstream (I’m jealous) and a tendency to leave your torrents seeding for a long time, then it’s in the interest of the swarm to get you the whole file right away so you can be turned into a seeder instead of a leecher who can only share a fraction of the whole file. The top dogs are valuable, so why not get them the file first so they can spread the love? As long as leechers aren’t penalized unnecessarily or harshly I don’t see the problem with giving a few benefits to altruistic seeders.

nice way to lurk in unsuspecting users

Nice to see that our idea has gotten a bit of attention. As it will be impossible to convince people. Please just wait a month or two and we hope to deliver better software.

We are improving a P2P client which has a build in understanding of people and Internet access asymmetry. Some private trackers have done a good job with ratio enforcement, other not. It is important to understand that is very difficult economic problem is at the hart of such systems. Most private trackers suffer from the problem which economists call the Babysitters problem… Details : http://arxiv.org/abs/0705.4110
(PDF, not a PNG)

Fortunatly not everyone needs to seed a lot. There are people who are willing to seed for a long time, just to be Number One in a highscore ranking of uploaders. So 1 guy gets social credits and gives away bandwidth for free to others.
I think it is important to facilitate the human side in P2P (more 2.0 buzz here)

Autospeed is a very good remark. I think an important improvement for todays client is more network-awareness. This is one of our research topics :
https://www.tribler.org/TriblerResearchSubjects

Johan.

Any advantage one might think this provides is outdone by the fact that you have to switch to their client. The “problems” it solves aren’t worth the effort.

Very true criticism of the worst side to private trackers. I even saw a pretty decent one I was in once move to enforce an “everyone less than 1.0 is OUT!” rule … presumably to their own destruction. There are certainly a lot of tracker admins who also happen to be morons out there! The key is to find good ones.

Demonoid is probably the best example of a massive private tracker which keeps functioning AND gives me room to upload to a good ratio without the tyranny of “rare leecher” swarms. I always make a point of prioritising the swarms where my (slow) seed is actually of significance. At Demonoid that means leaving popular ones at 0.1 ratio while sticking with smaller ones well above 5.

@Anonymous #9

I have a one word answer for your problem: Autospeed. Azureus isn’t everyone’s cup of tea, but that function when well tuned is your best friend. Basically it detects when your pipe is getting clogged and throttles the torrents back so browsing etc. still works. Frankly essential for any shared home cable, and frustrating so many good clients like µtorrent don’t feature it.

I have a coder bud who’s building this feature into Transmission (a svelte native Mac client) to save me the bother of Azureus’ Java Achilles Heel. So far it’s testing quite nicely.

@Varun S

Counterfeits indeed. A good point. But notice how counterfeiting still doesn’t force the real world off hard cash? It’s kind of like Google Bombing … sometimes it’s a problem but overall Google and the world’s advanced economies work well. Comes down to balance I expect.

Very true criticism of the worst side to private trackers. I even saw a pretty decent one I was in once move to enforce an “everyone

So sorry Harvard, but as long as any “currency” is used there will always be counterfeiters.

Give-to-get sucks

Right off the top of my head, I think such a model emphasizes the “currency” over actual sharing. File sharing optimization focuses on increasing general sharing speeds, not on increasing available bandwidth. This is a crucial distinction that will cause this project to tank.

Since optimization occurs as an increase in _actual_ transfer speeds, and not in “potential” speeds (as in the currency model), then naturally the algorithm should address the actual transfers and not the potential ones (I’m using “potential transfers” to refer to bandwidth, which may or may not be used for actual transfers). As Bram has pointed out, the latter model will have wasted bandwidth (e.g. in the “250 seeders to 1 leecher” scenario), since it addresses potential transfers, a.k.a. “bandwidth”, and therefore its subjects may or may not actually materialize as real transfers; the ones that don’t result in wasted bandwidth. Wasted bandwidth = 250 seeders sitting around, wasting resources on both ends, just to keep a good ratio.

Join a private tracker and run a torrent that has a 250:1 s/l ratio and see how long it takes to keep a good d/u ratio. The ratio is not important at all, since leeching without seeding will hardly negatively affect the swarm at all, yet you will still be punished with a poor ratio. Since the focus is on the node’s ratio rather than on the swarm’s sharing efficiency, it results in such a very sub-optimal situation. A good ratio doesn’t necessarily imply efficient file sharing, which is why Bram so vehemently opposes private trackers that focus on ratios.

Read up on game theory and the Prisoner’s Dilemma (which is directly translatable to file sharing). In game theory lingo, the “currency” model focuses on winning matches, not on winning points. For the Prisoner’s Dilemma, tit-for-tat has so far been the best overall strategy. That is a mathematical fact.

Upload more, you download faster.

this project sounds good on paper, but time will shed more light on this idea.