Gaming farming rewards - cost for GETs

[oetyng]

@Traktion

I could imagine a PtP group setting up, where everyone shares their rarely accessed files

This is the thing @torss described in the PtP topic.

My response to him:

@oetyng

torss:

No, what I am thinking of is systematic, automated abuse, that can be easily joined by anyone.
E.g. a tool that sends random GET requests for resources of the automated abuser group (i.e. the data is simply discarded, the GET requests only serve to obtain the GET rewards for the abusers).
Thus there would be pointless work in the network that only helps the abusers. The more abusers join the abuse-system, the more the network as a whole will be affected. Yet individual abusers would benefit from the abuse (until there are too many abusers for the abuse to be sustained).

And such an abuse tool would require only the initial development and could have basically no further costs.

OK, let’s look at this one. It would be a fun tool to create!
So, I have junk content that I want to upload, but I need to generate traffic at highest possible rate, from enough varied locations, that I don’t hit an intermediary cache on the path.
There’s an upper limit to this rate. It looks to me as if the maximum number of nodes in last hop before destination, sets this limit. A bit simplified, you cannot exceed the number of requests it takes to round-robin through these before first called cache expires. To complicate it a bit, there’s the influence of churn, which introduce ‘artificial’ cache eviction in this set of nodes, at some frequency.
So for every chunk I have, I would want to find this optimal number of other users, that I exchange this chunk with for one of theirs, that I can periodically GET on, in exchange for them GETing on mine.

This tool can of course also be abused. It needs some credibility system, otherwise I could supply you with chunks but not care to do GETs on your chunks. I.e. cheating the tool. Considering the tool is a device for cheating a system, with target audience presumably being inclined cheaters, this is a quite high risk.

If it’s going to be a trusted group, the scalability and thus threat of the tool, is limited. If it is going to be a decentralised tool which anyone can join (as per the suggestion), then it needs to form these secure incorruptible groups of consensus that can make sure the rules are followed. Closest source of such logic would be SAFENetwork.

But already here, this seems like a very big project. Not an easy tool to develop.
Let’s ponder that for a minute before jumping on to further speculations.