Cost benefit. Look at the cost of doing botnets. There is a reason DDOS attacks only last hours to a day or two. PtP from my understanding is not a huge money maker in short periods. Caching messes that up.
The problem as I see it is that setting up such a BotNet would be extremely difficult when you know where the correct nodes are to hit to avoid caching,
But with Safe that is impossible because of 2 major reasons
- the route the data takes is unknown to the attacker.
- the attacker does not know which node each bot will connect to before it connects.
To overcome these issues becomes a high cost for the Botnet and reduces its effectiveness and time it can actually achieve anything before it dies off.
People seem to think that PtP will pay out big time. If it did then its unsustainable longer term as more and more works are added to the network.
Caching will mean that the rewards will be paid out on a more organic basis with millions of people around the world accessing good content rather than 10K or 100K or 1 million bot operating for few hours up to 2 days getting defeated by caching.
TL;DR it needs to be tested with caching turned on.
Yes there will be some income made from it. Question is if it will be greater than the cost of time, effort and dollars to set up the botnet to do it.
Every system will be gamed to some extent. But is that a reason not to do it? Testing will answer this for PtP.
For instance farming will be gamed. People will spam malware out to 100’s of millions of email addresses to try and install a node on the poor person’s machine. Honestly this would have the potential to make a lot more money than any botnet to try and get pennies from PtP
EDIT: The huge benefit to the network with PtP is the attraction of people to the network and to upload their favourite tutorials, screenshots, videos (eg youtube replacement) and so on. Also it will encourage artists to upload the best quality to the network and so on.
This will be a valuable aid, in my opinion, to acceptance of the network by artists and people with a lot of content people want to view. More people viewing means greater network effect and so on.
So even with people maybe gaming 10% (won’t be possible in my opinion) of all PtP rewards the results from having it could mean the network accelerates in acceptance and adoption. Also helps against the economic attacks Dimitar talks of because its one thing an attacking player would include in their network.