Gigabytes instead of the dollar. Will traffic become the new world currency?

    The dollar’s ​​place in the information economy of the future may be taken by a more relevant unit of value - gigabytes. Throughput micro-limits on backbone communication channels can become settlement units in electronic commerce. In stores, we can buy food, giving megabytes and gigabytes of our traffic. For example, a loaf of bread - two gigabytes, milk - three gigabytes, plus a courier to the house for a gigabyte. Salaries can also be issued in petabytes. Such an original payment system based on torrents and P2P was developed by scientists from the Netherlands and the USA ( detailed description ).

    Scientists believe that the main consumer of traffic in the future will be video. It will be so demanding on the band that in the P2P system of communication channels it will constantly be lacking, therefore, it will be necessary to develop an effective system of resource allocation and allocation of quotas for each user. Outbound traffic will become a real value.

    To install on client computers, scientists have released the universal program Tribler, based on the BitTorrent protocol. By the logic of its action, it resembles a torrent tracker, which counts incoming and outgoing traffic. Only here there is no centralized tracker, and all calculations occur in a global distributed system, and settlements between users are also possible. This is simply an ideal platform for the global global payment system, although it requires changes in some financial mechanisms, such as money issue by national banks (telecoms), inflation regulation, etc.

    Scientists have developed a two-component system of micro and macro levels with a built-in payment security mechanism. To the standard BitTorrent protocol, they have added a reliable identification system.on the Elliptic Curve Cryptography protocol ( Python code ). On top of it is a peer-to-peer exchange protocol called “altruism levels” called BarterCast ( Python code ). The level of altruism is calculated as the proportion between incoming and outgoing traffic for each user.

    The peer-to-peer system integrates the functionality of a social network.
    The micro-level also has a Give-to-Get settlement system ( Python code ). Initially, the system was developed for peer-to-peer video transmission. For more information and performance tests, see Give-to-Get: an algorithm for P2P Video on Demand (PDF). The presentation of the system will be held at the conference of multimedia computing and networks in January 2008.

    The idea of ​​using traffic for global settlements is not popular with everyone. Critics recall that the ever-memorable Enron Corporation tried to implement this utopia, which turned out to be one of the largest frauds in human history. For at least one reason, “gigabytes-dollars” must be treated with caution.

    via Slashdot

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