…but I did specifically argument that a botnet or similar isn’t needed for abuse. 
If you don’t mind please read that part again and tell me why it is wrong:
You’re saying that with marketing you can get worthless material popular? Or that you can get material people find useful popular?
I mean, that first thing isn’t exactly easy to do. Sure possible, but it’s more like any remarkable success; practically everyone fail trying, very few succeed. If you succeed to successfully make people interested in objectively worthless material, over extended periods of time, with marketing that is compensated by the rewards - you have done something truly remarkable.
The other thing isn’t really a problem.
I don’t get how this is even an argument.
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And yes my previous answer also answered that too
Because to abuse it you must attempt to get a LOT of GETs in order to justify the time, money and resources spent attempting to do it. No matter how, unless you get maybe a 100K people doing the GETS at random time. Anything too fast from say 10K or 20K people then caching will hurt you every time.
The problem is getting enough people in enough locations (XOR space wise) to make caching as effective as it it is for legit access. Good luck trying that and keeping your 100K friends and not raking up a lot of cost in personal time and extra expenses (pizza, phone bills, internet bills etc)
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good try mate … but I won’t be speculating on what I’m planning to upload assuming PtP!
Doesn’t sound like sincere argument though, more like folding down, since you’re trying to say there shouldn’t be PtP. So I am guessing you don’t really have that super-idea how to get rich quick on it. 
But then again, if you think you have. Sure
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I’m not planning to get rich quick … just adding to residual.
I’m against PtP generally because of KISS principle and the fact that I don’t like the macro-economics of it … but if it is going to exist, then I will endeavor to take advantage of the micro-economics of it as much as is possible … perhaps it won’t be possible though. I think until it exists and we can get some solid estimates on it, then no way to know (for me personally).
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My point is exactly that abusers could in fact hold the same properties as legit users, e.g. be spread in enough locations.
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.
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Very simplified. For one, it requires that you actually have any. Big selling point of network is that it’s free to use. Wouldn’t be that big of a thing if it wasn’t expected that many users will be using it without having balance.
So, a potentially genius influence on network dynamics is thrown away by neglecting this.
I don’t think anyone is. You research potential features to find simple solutions that hit the target. So…
They are not exclusive though so why put them up against eachother? About abuse, that is big part of design of such a thing naturally. For such potentially huge impacting things, “seems” is not quite enough. Just look at SAFENetwork, or any decentralised network, the quotation could very well have been said about it a couple of years ago (hell, some still do).
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Imo the real potential of get rewards is to have an algorithm that dynamically adjusts farming, ptd, and ptp rates to maximize growth. It’s a multidimensional optimization issue. If there is not enough storage, the network raises farming ratio and reduce others… Network detects that not enough quality apps are being used, Ptd ratio goes up… Network detects that content consumption is down, Ptp rates go up and vice versa etc.
Obviously, coming up with ways to detect these things and writing the dynamic controls takes work and may turn out to offer little improvement over fixed ratios. So better to just start testing with fixed ratios like 1/10 as proposed. There is a lot of potential here.
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I’m going to collect the few expressed concerns that I didn’t see already met here.
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.
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.
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.
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Good counter point that a naive tool could itself be abused!
<potential-somewhat-more-sophisticated-but-imperfect-tool>
Hm so let’s instead say that the tool is somewhat more advanced and always “exchanges” GET requests between two parties, where each one fulfills the desired GET request of the other.
The parties randomly contact each other (Side note: The abuse system doesn’t have to be optimal, only good enough for most abusers long-term.).
To assure that the GET requests actually happen, e.g. some random part of the retrieved data could be checked. If the exchange is successful, a kind of “trust” score for these parties is increased.
This score could be stored both locally by the parties, as well as published globally for other tool users (cryptographically signed). To mitigate false published trust scores, the tool could only deem published scores themselves as trustworthy if the publisher is already directly or indirectly known to be trustworthy.
</potential-somewhat-more-sophisticated-but-imperfect-tool>
tl;dr: You are right, a secure implementation would be non-trivial, albeit still feasible.
So I’m not completely convinced that this isn’t a potential serious issue long-term², but I no longer think it is extremely problematic, thanks! 
As another side note, the content doesn’t necessarily have to be junk, only the abuser GET requests are “pointless”, but that doesn’t affect the arguments here anyway.
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Tipping is optional, not required.
Having a few pennies in a ‘loose change wallet’ isn’t needed on day 1, but the user may like to support creation of content they love.
As ptp has been described as a small payment, it wouldn’t take many tips to provide a similar income. There is also the benefit that it is targeted at content which has been enjoyed subjectively.
Ptp is potentially damaging to the network, as it does not reward content which people subjectively value; it rewards click bait, bots, non-producers, etc, too. These rewards could have been channelled to genuine producers of material that people genuinely value.
IMO, ptp has white elephant written all over it. I would much rather see resources focusses on making tipping easier (as easy as a like button).
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So you disagree with PtD too? Because it has the same problem with clickbait, copies of APPs, fake APPs, etc
Yes.
I would rather have a tip button, much like the like button below this message. If I could configure it to send a penny each time, I would… and I suspect I would still click it as often too.
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I don’t think you get my point. Tipping being optional is not at question here.
For user to be able to do tipping it requires them to have a balance.
So, again:
Thus, a large portion of potential income for a producer, is disabled by not using PtP here.
You didn’t respond to that.
It seems you still think they are mutually exclusive?
I don’t see any reason to not have a super well designed tipping experience.
It only takes so much time to craft it, then there’s rest of eternity to craft PtP. So, what is the real reason you don’t want it?
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Yep, and not only abused by non-loyal abusers; as soon as SAFENetwork supporters get a whiff of it, they’ll all rally to insert qualified quality chunks of their choice, without reciprocal GETs, as to saturate the abuse-network capacity and amplifying the legit PtP activity - thus both disarming the threat and turning the abusers to involuntary upholders of PtP.
Yes of course, just assuming that junk is more likely to be part of it, if it’s industrial scale, since it’s so much easier to generate.
No right, this is fun
From here we can continue with assuming the application exists, and see how it would be a serious issue long-term².
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It’s not quite true though that
it does not reward content which people subjectively value
It sure rewards them, just as it rewards anyone who gets GETs.
The point I assume you’re trying to make is that it also rewards the list of actors you suggest?
So, we have click-baits, bots and non-producers.
- Bots have been handled quite well by @neo I would say. Is there anything in his arguments that doesn’t hold you say?
- Non-producers, is that the audience whales @Antifragile was talking about, to which I answered here? Any counters to my response there?
- Click-baits. This we haven’t talked about yet.
Is it the only problem left now among all anti-PtP:ers? (I assume @TylerAbeoJordan, that these points above are the ‘macro-economics’ you refer to as problematic?)
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I didn’t refer to the macro-economics of PtP as ‘problematic’ … I just said I don’t like the macro-economics of it.
And no, those points are not the macro-economics of it … the macro-econ of it is that it money coming from the network and not the people themselves -regardless of the how the payment is being made (likes, bots, click-baits, etc), this is an additional source of monetary-inflation. I don’t believe it is a severe problem or that it will break the network (although I can’t say for sure either way) … I just simply think it is an unnecessary thing, violates the KISS principle and hence IMO shouldn’t be implemented.
I really am repeating myself at this stage though. If and when Maidsafe produces an RFC, then I’ll be there to discuss more … I feel though that I’ve said my piece on this over the years as it stands.
Ok, let’s see! So assuming a secure / effective abuse-tool is developed and used by a growing number of people, the problem would be that the “abuse-GETs” exist absolutely only to reap GET rewards over time (i.e. the actual received data would be ignored). This means any network traffic and processing done due to this abuse is basically wasted and the abusers gain currency for doing so.
As you have already stated, legitimate users could of course also use this abuse-tool, mitigating the problem somewhat, but anyone participating in the abuse system still causes the pointless “abuse-GETs”. The de facto waste of network resources then increases with the rising amount of “abuse-GETs”, and there is no reliable incentive to reverse the abuse-increase since anyone who leaves the abuse-system will only lower their own rewards.
Thus why I still think that this kind of stuff could be problematic long-term in a real internet-sized network.
(Edit: As discussed this is only true if such an effective abuse-tool were developed; any insufficiently secured tool could be tricked / starved.)
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Well, you don’t like it because you consider something problematic with it I would assume, so 
A bit defensive vibes I hear. You could have just said “yeah, sort of, but …” Oh well, I’ll leave it at that
Anyway, so this is the thing you consider problematic, and additionally that it supposedly violates KISS, and (for some reason) being unnecessary. Now you had the chance to mention it all so I assume this is all.
I’ll continue for the sake of dissemination of these parts, so don’t feel compelled to answer (but please do if you wish), and thanks for providing input.
Another source of inflation, I think @neo handled this as well, but I’m not sure, what do you say @neo? (Edit: My piece in that regard was that it is to be considered an investment, the possible inflation would be well compensated by the growth of the network it leads to - and that would actually be regardless of illegitimate PtP beneficiary or not. Now, both you and me naturally have left to more in detail show any of those scenarios is more likely than the other.)
Violating KISS I would guess is only applicable if the whole thing is unnecessary (which you say it is). Otherwise the whole network could qualify as violating KISS, or any feature at all in it, since they all (mostly) are very complex.
So, seems we are left with an argument that it is unnecessary. I found it a bit hard to counter because there’s not much substance there to counter.
But I’ll assume then that you think tipping will have the effect pro-PtP:ers suggest PtP will have, and that PtP contribution to producers will be insignificant in comparison.
That could be an argument. I don’t see it fully supported in any way though. So I guess we’d have to clear that up.