Poll: Should MaidSafe implement PtP (Pay the Provider)?

[oetyng]

I’m going to collect the few expressed concerns that I didn’t see already met here.

@Antifragile

So first uploader has only costs for uploading. If that content becomes somehow attractive than big whales owning audience will copy it, modify a little and earn money via PtP on it.

Assumption:
Owning audience will put you in a position to harvest quality content from skilled people without audience.
Angle:
It might be true that they get the position, but does that equal that it is profitable?
How do you discover quality content produced by someone without audience? Seems like gold digger work, and that isn’t necessarily very profitable.
For it to be efficient it seems to me you can’t spend much time digging through piles of junk, to maybe find that undiscovered gem. You need to be made aware of it. The more likely that you become aware of it, the more likely the producer actually has an audience (the medium through which you got aware).
If however there are big audience whales trawling the mud to find undiscovered gems, I as an unknown super gifted producer, would actually be able to profit from being discovered and spread to this whale audience. Maybe that is a good trade off then. Because I don’t see it as a given that the audience would prefer the whale once they find out about this hard working gifted producer that they obviously like.

@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.

@andyypants

I mean nothing stops both from happening, but I think there will be a psychological barrier to donating if the provider is already automatically getting paid by the network.

Interesting, and hard to verify. But I guess there might be plenty of psychological research that come quite close - if not exactly spot on - to this. And that may very well be our best source of knowledge for it. Even after such a thing is in the wild, evaluation will be difficult due to the fact that a big part of the data to evaluate is protected by SAFENetwork.