Bandwidth as a Currency

status: detailing work plan

The goal is to create a self-organising market for Internet bandwith. Initial usage is performance and privacy enhancement.

  • The user interface of Tribler indicates the current bandwith balance, shown as download strength.
  • Every peer can boost bandwidth balance by activating the improve button.
  • In improve mode a peer contacts the special [Swarm_FFFF]
  • In this swarm the bandwidth offering peers advertise them selves
  • incoming requests are honored if and only if the requester has sufficient social capital advertised through BarterCast
  • succesfull transfers are propagated using BarterCast to the cloud
  • as a reward for service the reputation of the donating peer is improved

Technical design

  • The bandwith market is implemented as special swarm FFFF
  • Every peer who recently used improve mode is advertising this in BuddyCast6
  • Such peer must remain in contact with swarm FFFF
  • Upon request using a PEX message peer shall return valid online swarm peers
  • Freshly installed peers or recently online peers can hence find the market by engaging in BuddyCast6 message exchanges
  • Peers can improve download and privacy by consuming bandwidth off the market
  • By using IP-prefix based selection a peer can choose a nearby peer for consuming bandwidth
  • This nearby peer is requested to download Bittorrent pieces using tit-4-tat machanism
  • Completed pieces at send at full speed to the requestor
  • By repeating the above most download links can be saturated
  • Consumed bandwidth accounting info is propagated using BarterCast

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