Presentation on September 27, Reading for September 27 and 29
As you can see from the reading list, I was scheduled to present on Monday.
Fortunately Alan went first with “Bin Gu and Sirkka Jarvenpaa, Are Contributions to P2P Technical Forums Private or Public Goods? - An Empirical Investigation, First Workshop on the Economics of Peer-to-Peer Systems, June 2003″. It was a short paper, and lacking in the sort of details that we could hope to have to properly assess it. Dr. Shapiro provides a nice summary. I didn’t exactly read that paper because I was busy preparing for my presentation.
My presentation which was on the BitTorrent Economics Paper also borrowed from an analysis of how torrents evolve over time and I didn’t get to seriously discuss it in class, nor seriously consider it on my own, but ways to make BitTorrent play with fee-based things are interesting. There is also a nice summaries by a student. Clearly, BitTorrent has lots of potential.
Of course, a lot of my time that should have been spent preparing for that presentation was instead spent considering the public key cipher that the author of BitTorrent devised. Also, a spent a decent amount of time wondering if I should alter my python presentation generation code (which produces simple old-style HTML) to produce SlideTeX (which I used this time) and the slide format files used in CGI::Kwiki. It is on my to-do list now, somewhere, I think.
Ok, so on to today’s reading:
“H. T. Kung and Chun-Hsin Wu, Differentiated Admission for Peer-to-Peer Systems: Incentivizing Peers to Contribute Their Resources, First Workshop on the Economics of Peer-to-Peer Systems, June 2003″ seems to, at first glance, not exactly scale because the matrix grows as order n-squared and it will likely be a sparse matrix or have obsolete entries (when nodes crash). They do eventually deal with my concern near the end. It isn’t a complete solution that they offer, but the mathematics behind how it works could be useful in such a system. (I have a feeling I’m going to be saying that about a lot of papers.)
“Nicolas Christin and John Chuang, On the cost of participating in a peer-to-peer network, The 3rd International Workshop on Peer-to-Peer Systems (IPTPS’04), February, 2004″ seems interesting, at least from the abstract: instead of proposing an incentive based solution, they’re discussing the “natural” disincentives that exist. It looks like a lot of math, they defer some proofs to a technical report, and concern themselves with topology, which could be interesting, but their treatment of it isn’t exactly a field I’m familiar with.
It should be noted that, due to other reasons, I’m running on a lack of sleep and only skimmed all papers (except the one that I presented).