BitTorrent and tit for tat (was: [ox-en] Re: The Future of Un-Money // was "Re: There IS such a thing as peer money")
- From: Stefan Merten <smerten oekonux.de>
- Date: Sun, 04 Jan 2009 21:23:56 +0100
Hi Michel, Marc, all!
The BitTorrent thing is something which I wanted to discuss for quite
some time now.
Last week (13 days ago) Michel Bauwens wrote:
I think that Bittorrent works best because it recogniwed bandwidth scarcity
even within the context of abundance, but it still seems to me that the
incentive is between the individual and the system, not tit for tat between
individuals; hence the logic is one of managing the commons, rahter than a
gift economy logic ...
Certainly.
To the degree a system moves to the scarcity continuum, it needs management
of the commons to incentive participation and discourage free-riding, to the
degree it moves to real abundance; it needs those less ...
I think this puts it very well.
However, I doubt that in this case bandwidth is really the scarce
resource. I remember the early times of Napster when you were not
forced to allow uploads and things worked well - though bandwidth was
generally far less available than today.
However, at this time it was not as clear as today that breaking
copyright can be punished.
While looking for that case I found
http://userpages.umbc.edu/~hamilton/btclientconfig.html#HowBTWorks
which nicely explains how BitTorrent works. Ironically in this text
"Alice searches for 'Matrix Reloaded'". 'Matrix Reloaded' as far as I
can see is a copyrighted work and thus it is dangerous to download it
but even more dangerous to offer it for uploading. So for me the
really scarce resource is the number of people who risk punishment for
downloading a file.
As a counter example I'd like to point at mirroring structures of
large data pools such as `mirrors for Ubunutu`_ or similar things.
.. _mirrors for Ubunutu: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Mirrors
There are relatively few mirrors from which everyone can download
large amounts of data from. However, it is completely legal that this
data is offered for downloading. I think this is the reason why legal
material is distributed by a more or less centralized infrastructure
while networks for illegal material need to force people to put
themselves in danger.
Grüße
Stefan
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