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Topic Name: Internet Currency:Next-generation model for safe and legal electronic commerce
Category: Networking
Research persons: David Parkes,Dr. Ir. Johan Pouwelse
Location: SEAS, Harvard University,33 Oxford Street, Cambridge, MA 02138, United States
Details
Computer scientists at Harvard's School of
Engineering and Applied Sciences, in collaboration with colleagues from the
Netherlands, are using a novel peer-to-peer video sharing application to explore
a next-generation model for safe and legal electronic commerce that uses
Internet bandwidth as a global currency.
The application is an enhanced version of a program called Tribler, originally
created by scientists at the Delft University of Technology and Vrije
Universities, Amsterdam to study video file sharing. The software exploits the
power of peer-to-peer technology, which is based on forming networks among
individual users.
“Successful peer-to-peer systems rely on designing rules that promote fair
sharing of resources amongst users. Thus, they are both efficient and powerful
computational and economic systems,” says David Parkes, John L. Loeb Associate
Professor of the Natural Sciences at Harvard. "Peer-to-peer has received a bad
rap, however, because of its frequent association with illegal music or software
downloads.”
Unlike traditional, centralized approaches, peer-to-peer systems are incredibly
robust, as they can scale smoothly since the software adjusts to the number and
behavior of individual users. The researchers were inspired to use a version of
the Tribler video sharing software as a model for an e-commerce system because
of such flexibility, speed, and reliability. “Our platform will provide fast
downloads by ensuring sufficient uploads,” explains Johan Pouwelse, an assistant
professor at Delft University of Technology and the technical director of
Tribler. “The next generation of peer-to-peer systems will provide an ideal
marketplace not just for content, but for bandwidth in general.”
The researchers envision an e-commerce model that connects users to a single
global market, without any controlling company, network, or bank. They see
bandwidth as the first true Internet “currency” for such a market. For example,
the more a user uploads now (i.e. earns) and the higher the quality of the
contributions, the more s/he would be able to download later (i.e. spend) and
the faster the download speed. More broadly, this paradigm empowers individuals
or groups of users to run their own “marketplace” for any computer resource or
service.
Another idea the researchers believe has enormous but untapped potential is the
combination of social network technology with peer-to-peer systems. “In the case
of sharing and playing video, our network-based system already allows a group of
‘friends’ to pool their collective upload ‘reserve’ to slash download times. For
Internet-based television this means a true instant, on-demand video
experience,” explains Pouwelse.
The researchers concede that the greatest challenge to any peer-to-peer backed
e-commerce system is implementing proper regulation in a decentralized
environment. To keep an eye on the virtual economy, Parkes and Pouwelse envision
creating a “web of trust,” or a network between friends used to evaluate the
trustworthiness of fellow users and aimed at preventing content theft,
counterfeiting, and cyber attacks.
To do so they will use a feature already included in the enhanced version of the
Tribler software, the ability for users to “gossip” or report on the behavior of
other peers. Their eventual goal is to find a way to create accurate personal
assessments or trust metrics as a form of internal regulation.
“This idea is not new, but previous implementations have been costly and are
dependent on a company and/or website being the enforcer. Addressing the ‘trust
issue’ within open peer-to-peer technology could lead to future online economies
that are legal, dynamic and scaleable, have very low start-up costs, and minimal
downtime,” says Parkes.
By studying user behavior within an operational “Internet currency” system, with
a particular focus on understanding how and why attacks, fraud, and abuse occur
and how trust can be established and maintained, the researchers imagine future
improvements to everything from on-demand television to online auctions to open
content encyclopedias.
About The Researchers:
David Parkes,
Contact Information:
Maxwell Dworkin 229,
SEAS, Harvard University,
33 Oxford Street,
Cambridge, MA 02138
(617) 384-8130 (w)
(314) 248-7899 (fax)
lastname - at - eecs.harvard.edu
John L. Loeb Associate Professor of the Natural Sciences and
Associate Professor of Computer Science,
School of Engineering and Applied Science,
Harvard University
Alfred P.
Sloan Research Fellow
Research Interests: Computational mechanism design; electronic
commerce; computational game theory; auction theory;
decentralized optimization; agent strategies; Internet economics; multi-agent
systems.
Dr. Ir. Johan Pouwelse
Delft University of Technology
T: 015-2782539
E: J.A.Pouwelse@ewi.tudelft.nl
Dr. ir. J.A. Pouwelse is a senior member of the
Peer-to-Peer team at Delft University of Technology. Recently, he conducted one
of the largest measurements of P2P networks. The detailed measurement study ran
over a period of two year and discovered many unique properties of the worlds
largest P2P file sharing system, called Bittorrent.
Recently he testified in Washington for the Federal Trade Commission hearing on
P2P file sharing. During the summer of 2003 he was a visiting scientist at the
peer-to-peer group of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Boston,
USA.
Created an new P2P system called
Tribler. With a team of 18 full-time researcher
we are continously improving Tribler. Funding is provided by the Dutch national
I-Share project and the
EU project
P2P-Fusion.
my e-mail address is j.a.pouwelse AT
ewi.tudelft.nl, feel free to contact me. (A. K. A. Peer2Peer AT GMail
Software:
Courses:
Ph.D. Thesis:
J.A. Pouwelse, "Power Management for Portable
Devices", Delft University of Technology, 20 Oct 2003
(4.4 MByte .pdf)
Other
interests:
- Early user of the
MythTV.org PVR Linux software
- Previous owner of the MP3.nl domain
(goto MP3.nl)
- Worked on the software for a mobile
multimedia device. The device is a SA1100 based Linux computer of only the
size of an PalmPilot (goto the LART pages)
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