This is quite a brilliant idea and could be used by mafiaa if they had least bit of intelligence

This could be used in a modified BitTorrent client where the initial seed charges 0.1 BTC per piece or whatever. Every peer just has to load up their client with 50 BTC and start downloading from the seed and those peers that will share. Maybe the peers could charge a small amount, too.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hash_tree#Tiger_tree_hash ?

Good idea.  Perhaps you should consider contacting GNUnet dev team and present to them the same idea and maybe both dev teams can work together to establish something.

An interesting aspect of information market is that it is, as far as I know, the only market where both transfers are, thanks to bitcoins, irrevocables and decentralized.

I mean : when you buy a piece of information, say a 32Ko block, you exchange pure information against bitcoin.  Both transfer doesn't imply the use of a trust party in any way, at least if you don't require compensation.  It's really a pure exchange model, from a technical point of view.

Therefore I think implementing a P2P information market software can be an interesting experimentation.

If I were to suggest a technique to do so, I would say that a P2P decentralized adjudication and compensation system would be installed, inspired from the bitcoin model.  Each bid and ask for a given hash would be broadcasted globally on the network, and a node would be allowed to perform both adjudication/compensation automatically after some proof of work of increasing difficulty.  The unpredictable location of this node would ensure honnesty of adjudication/compensation.  At least as long as the honnests nodes are majoritary, like in the bitcoin model.

Let me give an example.

Say Alice is a node in the network, and wants to buy the 32Ko block whose hash is HHH.  She lets every nodes in the network know what she wants (she broadcasts a bid).   Bob has HHH, and in response, he broadcast a ask for this block.  After some time, all nodes will have their own copies of a global orders book stored in their memory.  According to the protocol, nothing happens until a node, say the one that belongs to Claire, performs a certain proof-of-work on this book order.  Then Claire does the adjudication of the book order, and publishes her results, resulting in the possibility of the exchange between Alice and Bob.  Alice then send bitcoins to Claire, and Bob sends the block to Claire.  Claire, then, sends block to Alice, and bitcoins to Bob, thus performing compensation.

Anyway, I think the information market problem is a interesting one, from a theoretical point of view.

There would be many ways to implement it, imo.  Only one would be perfect, and we should keep looking for it.  For instance, the above proposal would suffer several problems.  One is that nothing is done to prevent dumb nodes to have the whole network waste time.  Indeed, a node might very well *try* to steal some bitcoins by pretending it has pretty much all hashes, although it actually has nothing.  The network would realize the scam and avoid it only at compensation level, thus wasting a lot of resource and time.  It could halt the whole network.  Thus, a trust system should be implemented, in order to avoid nodes that try to publish rubbish.  The economics algorithm of GNUnet would do the job, I guess.

An other idea :  in a "do one thing, but do it well" philosophy, adjudication and compensation should be separated.  In our example, this would mean that Claire would only be in charge of adjudication.  She would process the order book and produce a "request for compensation".  Such a request would then be broadcasted in the network, and an other proof-of-work would be required on it before the compensation could be performed by an other node, say Daniel.

Both Claire and Daniel, seen respectively as a Adjudicator and a compensator, would be judged in the trust GNUnet model by Alice and Bob for their respectives roles, so that they can be avoided later if they don't do their job properly.

I'm not sure that free riders are an issue as long as the seller can make sure he raised the expected amount of money.

If you buy a car, and then lend it to a friend, I'm not sure your friend can be considered as a "free rider".  Once your car is bought, you can share it with someone else : it's not the initial seller's business anymore.  Selling divulgation allows alienation, while selling diffusion doesn't.

Indeed, it's likely to be less profitable, of course.  But since sellers presently use public force to sell, I can understand that they make more money than if they wouldn't.  A gangster certainly makes less money with no gun.

IMHO for this hypothetic information market to be attractive it needs several pre-conditions like an existing anonymous p2p network where content is spread anyway. Else there won't be a big demand for such an information market: Without an anonymous network it's still more lucrative for an information distributor to sell information the traditional way. This may not apply to content where small amounts of earnings are expected.
Also necessary would be a rethinking of people about how they buy content and about the idea of property.

From the point of view of a consumer it will look like this:

• Buy block(s) for a quite low price if demand is high
• Wait for the expected money to be raised (if it will be raised at all!)
• When raised, download remaining blocks and finally be able to consume content
• Live with the fact that others will be able to consume content without ever having to buy blocks

From the point of view of an information seller

• Advantage that there is no need to provide a distribution infrastructure itself like file servers etc.
• Necessity to set a price one time without room to make more profit in the future with the same content

Will a purchaser risk to invest any money even if there is a chance that the expected money will not be raised at all?
Are people patient enough to wait for the complete blocks to be sold until they can consume the content? How long will it take? The less popular, the longer it will take?

Oh my god, imagine if hamburgers were sold that way!

Of course.  But this first pre-condition is satisfied already :  P2P anonymous network exist.


Setting a selling price and sticking to it is a business model in *a lot* of other economic sectors.  I don't see why it wouldn't work for information.


I don't know.  The thing is :  they don't have much choice.  It's this or they don't see content at all.  That's the point about ownership :  you're supposed to have some control on access to the thing you own.  Selling is about requesting money for this access.  If you don't want to pay, then you just have to forget about accessing to the thing you wanted.  It's a choice the buyer has to make.

Yes, as long as my desire to get the content overcomes my fear of losing 5$.

Of course, it's up to the seller to evaluate this probability and adjust his price.  Sometimes, he just won't find any acceptable price and will give up the idea of making the product.  It's not much different from conventionnal businesses.