Can MaidSafe Decentralize the Internet? [BLOG POST]

[oldman]

Kudos to BM - well reasoned and well written.

Reading through the posts here https://www.maidsafe.org/t/bytemater-bitshares-daniel-larimer-opinion-on-maidsafe/2902/29 shows how similar the Bitshares and Maidsafe communities are.

Measured and respectful responses from the Maidsafe community, similar (perhaps even more measured) than responses from the Bitshares community.

All in this exercise further reinforces my view of Bitshares and Maidsafe being the two techs most likely to change the way the world works.

Great people doing great work!

[bytemaster]

http://bytemaster.bitshares.org/article/2015/02/01/Thoughts-on-MaidSafe-and-an-Alternative-Approach/

[VoR0220]

Touching on a lot of things that I see as well. Well done.

[hadrian]

I'd love to hear David Irvine comment on the blog post. If I see anything I'll come back to this thread to mention it.

Edit: Just had a look and saw this on the Maidsafe forum (with no comment from David yet) https://www.maidsafe.org/t/bytemater-bitshares-daniel-larimer-opinion-on-maidsafe/2902

[mdj]

Nice blog post, I am very excited for Maidsafe. Even if the network does cost more, I think it's a cost worth paying.

[Empirical1.1]

  Very good and interesting blog

Helps a lot that you point out your long relationship with and admiration with the project before going into critique. Also helps that you point out (lament) some of the same problems affecting your own project. Finally, that you expect and hope that they do well based on their talents, and that they should visit here to correct any wrongs. Very happy about all of this 

 

[CLains]

Now I finally understand MaidSafe.. and the problem with micro-transactions. 

Helps a lot that you point out your long relationship with and admiration with the project before going into critique. Also helps that you point out (lament) some of the same problems affecting your own project. Finally, that you expect and hope that they do well based on their talents, and that they should visit here to correct any wrongs. Very happy about all of this 

From a marketing perspective it would be pragmatic to copy some of this blog post and create a new one called, "the problem with micropayments," then include keywords related to 'micro-transactions' such as 'micropayment,' 'micro transaction,' 'paypal microtransaction,' 'what is micro transaction?' etc. in the blogpost for SEO.

[theoretical]

Lets assume you download a movie that is 1 GB in size and has been divided up into 1000 chunks each 1 MB. Because this is a P2P network with a million nodes, you get each chunk from a different peer. Now it comes time to pay the bill and you discover that you owe 1000 small payments.

How small should these payments be?

We know from Netflix that the cost of providing 1GB of data is $0.01 and falling. This means that you owe 1000 people each $0.00001 for the MB of data that you downloaded from them. This is well below the level of what Bitcoin considers dust and would be uneconomical to process even in a very centralized way.

I've been having some thoughts about this specific problem.  My idea is instead of having 1000 payments worth $0.00001, you write 1000 tickets for a lottery whose prize is $0.01.  Transmitting the tickets directly to the peers you're downloading from.

Only the winning ticket would result in an actual transfer of value and thus only the winning ticket would need to be published on the ledger (blockchain or otherwise).  You'd need to validate the serial number on the ticket falls within the valid range.  I'm pretty sure you'd also need some form of "forfeit a bond if someone rats out your bad behavior" operation to deal with double spending (writing multiple tickets to different recipients with the same serial number).

[bytemaster]

http://bytemaster.bitshares.org/article/2015/01/30/Can-MaidSafe-Decentralize-the-Internet/