1.4 KiB
1.4 KiB
Economics of BitTorrent communities
Authors
- Ian A. Kash - iankash@microsoft.com
- John K. Lai - jklai@seas.harvard.edu
- Haoqi Zhang - hq@eecs.harvard.edu
- Aviv Zohar - avivz@microsoft.com
DOI
Summary
The paper is a study of a BitTorrent community called DIME, where users share live concert recordings. The community has around 100K users and the study analyses data gathered over 6 months.
Main ideas
- The DIME system enforces a ratio of at least 0.25: 4 downloads for 1 upload
- Many users have a ratio above 1 (which shows an altruistic behaviour)
- New files are more attractive to users and have high demand at the beginning
- Users with high bandwidth Internet connections take advantage of new files to take credits
- Old files are no good to gain credit because they are not in high demand
- There are periods where downloads are free
- Users prefer to download old files during free periods
Observations
- The paper does not give any numbers about the amount of data available in total
- The paper does not provide data about the file size distribution
- Overall the paper provides interesting data about how sharing communities behave but no data about the decentralized storage itself.
Other ideas
- Some aspects of the demand for files with respect to their life could be applied to other decentralized storage systems