Bit of a braindump on latency, so not a direct reply to the quote above, but the quote adds some context…
For me the risk with latency bottlenecks is it can very easily become an unintended centralizing force.
For example, if safecoin is awarded on a first-to-serve basis, rewards are prettymuch only affected by latency, not by bandwidth.
So vaults with high latency never get safecoin, thus leave their section, thus further concentrating low latency vaults in that section (which is good for performance, right?!). But if the ‘worst case latency’ keeps dropping out, eventually the section will be entirely within a single data centre. It’s a bit oversimplified, but latency is a tricky character in the reward scheme. And the distribution of file / traffic sizes seems to indicate that latency more than bandwidth is going to be important to consider.
Is latency a resource or not? Is low latency a better resource than high latency? There’s not really a clear answer to me just yet.
Maybe batching will help.
Maybe parallelism will help.
But these are scaling via bandwidth and don’t actually improve latency, which seems unimprovable. Bandwidth improvements can hide the effects of latency but not improve latency itself. Maybe that’s good enough?!
And then there’s the concern of Peter Todd who claims you can never tell if redundancy has been achieved, and his proposal is to use latency measurements to correspond to geographical distribution (which is just one dimension of redundancy). So latency has a lot of interesting properties, some good some bad.