Re: [GNUnet-developers] Economic System

[leo stone]

Hi Christian,

thanx for the link. I've read it and except from a few other questions there is one I can't get my head around.

Maybe you can explain this better to me.

Let's call this the "I'd like to help but they don't let me 'cause they don't trust me" syndrome.

I consider following situation:

A new node is willing to participate and connects to the net where all nodes have already accumulated a lot of trust to each other.

A->10000000

B->10000000  D? <- 0 E (new)

C->10000000

If the algorithm in each node is : delegate to the node wich gives me potantially the best results, ergo choose

the ones i trust most 

how will the new node ever get a chance to serve any request, and so be able to build up trust???

and if it's actually possible how long will it take node E to become competitive? Will node E not give up before that?

If i imagine what happens if such a system evolves over time it develops disjoint "bubbles of trusting nodes", which will reflect pretty much the time when the have joined the network and so had the same trust level and so were willing to delegate to each other.

This is actually what happens in real life as well, the longer a trusting circle exists the harder it becomes to get in except they have some counter mechanism. But usually it is intended to keep a trusting circle small.

Please explain to we what I didn't get right. tx 

  

 

On Fri, Jun 19, 2009 at 4:08 AM, Christian Grothoff <address@hidden> wrote:

Hi Leo!

Well, the primary resource for the economic system is the paper on the
subject, which you can find at

http://gnunet.org/download/ebe.pdf

(much more readable then trying to get it out of the code).  Also, in contrast
to the ECRS paper, this paper is actually up-to-date with what the code is
doing.

Now, you say you "wonder if this part of gnunet was ever questioned" -- that's
a bit harder to answer; obviously quite a few people have thought about it and
asked questions, and there are quite a few good open questions in this
context.  However, I am not aware of a well-reasoned suggestion for
improvement at this point.  The two major research questions that stand out
for me are:

1) How can we give the user feedback to make him *feel* that by earning trust
he is getting better service? While this may seem like a UI issue, related
issues such as gathering the speed-up data (how much speed-up was obtained)
and making it significant (maybe the benefit is not large enough to begin
with?) without compromising the overall security properties would also be
addressed to get the main issue resolved.

2) How should we set prices?  The paper gives some basic constraints on how
peers should set prices, but it doesn't give anything near a closed-form
answer for price-formation.  The code currently uses heuristics which lack
proper justification for why they are good or even optimal.  Having a better
pricing mechanism (how much a peer offers for content, when, how often, etc.)
would likely help with question (1) by presumably making the speed-up more
dramatic.  Evaluation methods I'd accept here range from complete mathematical
models to (good) simulations.

Both of these questions have been raised many times over the years by myself
and others.  I think skilled researcher with enough time and energy could most
likely find a reasonable answer for (2); gathering speed-up data without
leaking information that might harm anonymity and/or some of the economic
principles sounds like a really hard problem (on the economic side, sharing
speed-up information is like giving a buyer information on the profit-margin
of a store without giving the buyer a reason (and data) for negotiating harder
for the next purchase...).  So I'm much less optimistic on finding a solution
on (1) short of improving (2) to the point that the speed up is "obvious".

As far as GNUnet growing, I am not sure this is the primary issue; ease-of-use
(including initial installation) and speed and scalability of the basic
routing algorithm (which is improving slowly over time, but still not quite
where I'd like it to be) are likely more relevant to overall growth.
Naturally, having good answers to the above two questions would also help.

Christian

On Thursday 18 June 2009 01:03:48 pm leo stone wrote:
> Hi All,
>
> since there are pretty big changes ahead for 0.9 maybe it's just the right
> moment to raise a few
> questions regarding the economic system. since i hadn't a look at the code
> i know nothing
> about it, except a blurry idea that a node prefers to serve nodes it trusts
> most. how this trust builds up and on what it is based is unclear to me.
> but before i start formulating any thoughts i'd like to understand the
> current implementation.
> are the any other sources except the code to grasp all the details?
>
> what i wonder is, if this part of gnunet was ever questioned?
>
> i really feel that right there could be the main cause that gnunet didn't
> grow as all the people would like to see
> it growing. but before i can start any argument i should first know what i
> am talking about so please
> point me to any available resource, explain it to me or tell me if the only
> source is the code.
>
> thx