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0 pointscookiengineer4y ago0 comments

> Bandwidth as a currency eventually proved to be a failure.

I'm not sure why everyone assumes that bittorrent was about currency. It wasn't, and that was its superpower. No matter how much you were able to contribute, you were able to strengthen its system, redundancy and availability.

The only problem bittorrent had in practice was a legal one that finally led to a problem of availability of discovery.

All that filecoin hype will lead to only one thing, and one thing only: the people that are popular will decide what files are worth to the system, and the masses will simply dump everything else and forget about it.

Add an inflation for every modification of any file in the whole system, and you have a perfect way to destroy real incentives.

I don't believe in most web3 projects because they always think it's about trading files with each other. It is not. Discovery and access to data should not be limited by your financial capability to buy things. The internet exploded because people got access to vast amounts of knowledge, for basically free compared to before.

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matheusmoreira4y ago

> I'm not sure why everyone assumes that bittorrent was about currency. It wasn't

Torrent trackers were and are to this day. The most successful trackers have proven to be those with a ratio economy. The late what.cd, often described as the library of alexandria of music, had the harshest ratio economy of them all.

> All that filecoin bullshit will lead to only one thing, and one thing only: the people that are popular will decide what files are worth to the system, and the masses will simply dump everything else and forget about it.

That's certainly a possibility. I don't know. I welcome discussion about this.

> Discovery and access to data should not be limited by your financial capability to buy things. The internet exploded because people got access to vast amounts of knowledge, for basically free compared to before.

Absolutely agree. Unfortunately, this is not possible with current copyright laws. This sort of utopia is currently only possible in underground networks such as private bittorrent swarms. It's been proven by history that some sort of incentive is necessary to get people to commit their personal resources -- storage and bandwidth -- to those networks. Ratio economies were created to address the leecher problem: users who simply downloaded what they want, without providing neither bandwidth or redundancy in return.