Simplicity in design. Episode 3. Fighting freeriders
Simplicity does not precede complexity, but follows it. / Alan J. Perlis /
This story began in the early 2000s, when everyone understood with the example of Gnutella that a peer-to-peer network kills free riders - a mass of parasite users who only download, but not distribute. A lot of articles were written about trust and traffic accounting in peer-to-peer networks. For example, “The EigenTrust Algorithm for Reputation Management in P2P Networks”, one of the most popular and cited articles in this area, where Garcia-Molina himself co-authored was presented at WWW'2003. As they say, everything is in class “A”. The article implied that peers would jointly calculate a PageRank-like metric, passing each other vectors of size N, where N is the number of participants. I know the unfortunates who even today continue to deal with such metrics, with O (N) data per node and complex rules of inference. And in real life, BitTorrent “won”, in which some reputation element was, of course, a tit-for-tat algorithm, “you tell me — I tell you”, but it was all much simpler than reputation accounting systems based on DHT and other such things. It is just that every feast is trying to respond in return and send traffic (interesting in trifles) to the three feasts that have pumped him the most in the last 20 seconds and one more randomly selected one. Of course, it should be recognized that simple reputation systems are also in progress. Stuffs, as I call them, or plugs. Sharing ratio enforcement is on the same torrents.ru, tvtorrents.com and where only it is not. But from my point of view, this proves the following: traffic will be the sea, if only there is some, even the most symbolic reward. If there is no reward at all, then there will be traffic. But not the sea. Like at thepiratebay.com.
In what direction is this area developing now? Apparently, in the direction of simplification. The fact is that the tit-for-tat algorithm required dividing the file into small pieces and then exchanging them using the rarest-first algorithm (which also contained a lot of funny articles). Plus “ratings”. All this is quite difficult. And what if the root cause of the conflict is removed - the motive that makes users stop sitting? More specifically, the problem is that it becomes very inconvenient to climb on the Internet while BitTorrent is running. This is due to the fact that all 50 connections opened by BitTorrent receive their traffic shares on an equal footing with those timid 4 TCP connections opened by the browser. As a result, the browser slows down. And if you abandon TCP and use a more timid transport for P2P that loads uplink, when it is free and quickly gives way to TCP traffic bursts? Many have read news about such a transport (uTP) in µTorrent. Stanislav Shalunov is engaged in its development in BitTorrent Inc. If uTP goes well, maybe it will be possible to redeem users in free traffic.
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From myself I will add. Then it will be possible to score on tit-for-tat and on rarest-first and finally, download files in order and watch the movie "by click", like on YouTube. Perhaps this will require a couple more fixes, but fundamentally the equation is this: users cannot download movies 24 hours a day. And they can sit 24 hours a day. Unless it creates inconvenience.
This story began in the early 2000s, when everyone understood with the example of Gnutella that a peer-to-peer network kills free riders - a mass of parasite users who only download, but not distribute. A lot of articles were written about trust and traffic accounting in peer-to-peer networks. For example, “The EigenTrust Algorithm for Reputation Management in P2P Networks”, one of the most popular and cited articles in this area, where Garcia-Molina himself co-authored was presented at WWW'2003. As they say, everything is in class “A”. The article implied that peers would jointly calculate a PageRank-like metric, passing each other vectors of size N, where N is the number of participants. I know the unfortunates who even today continue to deal with such metrics, with O (N) data per node and complex rules of inference. And in real life, BitTorrent “won”, in which some reputation element was, of course, a tit-for-tat algorithm, “you tell me — I tell you”, but it was all much simpler than reputation accounting systems based on DHT and other such things. It is just that every feast is trying to respond in return and send traffic (interesting in trifles) to the three feasts that have pumped him the most in the last 20 seconds and one more randomly selected one. Of course, it should be recognized that simple reputation systems are also in progress. Stuffs, as I call them, or plugs. Sharing ratio enforcement is on the same torrents.ru, tvtorrents.com and where only it is not. But from my point of view, this proves the following: traffic will be the sea, if only there is some, even the most symbolic reward. If there is no reward at all, then there will be traffic. But not the sea. Like at thepiratebay.com.
In what direction is this area developing now? Apparently, in the direction of simplification. The fact is that the tit-for-tat algorithm required dividing the file into small pieces and then exchanging them using the rarest-first algorithm (which also contained a lot of funny articles). Plus “ratings”. All this is quite difficult. And what if the root cause of the conflict is removed - the motive that makes users stop sitting? More specifically, the problem is that it becomes very inconvenient to climb on the Internet while BitTorrent is running. This is due to the fact that all 50 connections opened by BitTorrent receive their traffic shares on an equal footing with those timid 4 TCP connections opened by the browser. As a result, the browser slows down. And if you abandon TCP and use a more timid transport for P2P that loads uplink, when it is free and quickly gives way to TCP traffic bursts? Many have read news about such a transport (uTP) in µTorrent. Stanislav Shalunov is engaged in its development in BitTorrent Inc. If uTP goes well, maybe it will be possible to redeem users in free traffic.
')
From myself I will add. Then it will be possible to score on tit-for-tat and on rarest-first and finally, download files in order and watch the movie "by click", like on YouTube. Perhaps this will require a couple more fixes, but fundamentally the equation is this: users cannot download movies 24 hours a day. And they can sit 24 hours a day. Unless it creates inconvenience.
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/66892/
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