Thanks, Lucky, for helping to kill gnutella

[Bram Cohen]

AARG!Anonymous wrote:

> I will just point out that it was not my idea, but rather that Salon
> said that the Gnutella developers were considering moving to authorized
> clients.  According to Eric, those developers are "fundamentally stupid."
> According to Bram, the Gnutella developers don't understand their
> own protocol, and they are supporting an idea which will not help.
> Apparently their belief that clients like Qtrax are hurting the system
> is totally wrong, and keeping such clients off the system won't help.

You can try running a sniffer on it yourself. Gnutella traffic is almost
all search queries. 

> As far as Freenet and MojoNation, we all know that the latter shut down,
> probably in part because the attempted traffic-control mechanisms made
> the whole network so unwieldy that it never worked. 

Mojo Nation actually had a completely excessive amount of bandwidth
donated to it. There was a problem that people complained of losing mojo
when running a server due to the total amount of upload being greater than
the total amount of download. The main user experience disaster in Mojo
Nation was that the retrieval rate for files was very bad, mostly due to
the high peer churn rate.

> At least in part this was also due to malicious clients, according to
> the analysis at http://www.cs.rice.edu/Conferences/IPTPS02/188.pdf.

Oh gee, that paper mostly talks about high churn rate too.

In fact, I was one of the main developers of Mojo Nation, and based on
lessons learned from that figured out how to build a system which can cope
with very high churn rates and has good leech resistance. It is now mature
and has had several quite successful deployments.

http://bitconjurer.org/BitTorrent/

Not only are the algorithms used good for leech resistance, they are also
very good at being robust under normal variances in net conditions - in
fact, the decentralized greedy approach to resource allocation outperforms
any known centralized method.

The TCPA, even if it some day works perfectly (which I seriously doubt it
will) would just plain not help with any of the immediate problems in
Gnutella, BitTorrent, or Mojo Nation. I would guess the same is true for
most, if not all other p2p systems.

-Bram Cohen

"Markets can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent"
                                        -- John Maynard Keynes


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