Private BitTorrent trackers are markets
Private torrent communities are markets, and the paper “Economics of BitTorrent Communities” does a great job exploring this with data:
I enjoyed the paper, so I figured I would share and summarize some keys points in a quick blog post.
Private torrent trackers are invite-only file sharing communities. Paying for an invite will get you and your inviter banned forever. Private trackers require you to maintain an upload/download ratio; if you only download and don’t give back to the community then you’ll be banned within a week.
The best private torrent trackers felt very special. Trent Reznor said OiNK was like “the world’s greatest record store. Pretty much anything you could ever imagine, it was there, and it was there in the format you wanted.”
This summary doesn’t do them justice; I’m just sharing the bare minimum so I can talk about the economics.
Private trackers require users to maintain upload/download ratios in order to keep their account. The exact requirement depends: some websites require a 1:1 ratio while just require you upload at least 25% of the amount you download.
Kash, Ian A., et al studied DIME, a private tracker for concert recordings. DIME requires users maintain a ratio of 0.25 so users have to upload at least a quarter of what they download. The paper reframes the ratio requirement as “credits”:
So, if I’ve uploaded 100MB to others and downloaded 150MB then I’ve got 250MB worth of credits.
Private trackers don’t ban users immediately if their ratio goes below 0.25. Almost all new users will start by downloading content and they need time to upload to other users. DIME doesn’t ban users for having a bad ratio until they’ve downloaded at least 5GB worth of content.
A file’s price is defined by its size. You’re spending credits for every byte you download. All files on a private tracker have the same price per byte.
Files vary in their “resale value”, meaning the credits a user can earn by seeding the file:
The price and resale value of files are central to the private tracker economy. Users need to keep both in mind in order to maintain a ratio and keep their account on the website.
The ratio requirement on DIME is 0.25 but many users go above and beyond. Why?
Users with higher ratios are basically marked as the upper class of the community and they’re rewarded with additional perks. Users also grow their wealth within the system for peace of mind; you never know if the files you download in the future will be popular, so why turn down seeding opportunities today?
DIME’s incentives work. User ratios spike around the minimum ratio and recommended ratio.
Brand new files are the best bet for a user that wants to make sure they can upload to other users and preserve their upload buffer.
DIME occasionally hosts a “free leech” period. During a free leech, downloading doesn’t affect your ratio but uploading still counts. Users downloading behavior changes during free leech periods, demonstrating that users understand how files lose “resale value” with time:
During free leech, demand spikes for older files that users wouldn’t otherwise have downloaded because of low resale value. The number of seeders in the network doesn’t change during free leech, so the supply of bandwidth for older files is there even when users avoid them due to the resale value penalty. It seems like everyone in the system would benefit from lowering the download cost and increasing the resale value proportional to the torrent’s age.
Kash, Ian A., et al recommend that DIME change their central pricing mechanism so that it decreases the download price over time:
Users with slower internet will have a harder time maintaining a ratio since they upload alongside other users with more bandwidth in order to share a fixed amount of data. This difference in earning potential shows up in the data. Lower earning users with slow internet connections seed files for longer to compensate.
At the end of the day, upload/download ratio requirements introduce an economy where users have to maintain a positive balance of an in-network currency. DICE effectively loans in-network currency to users until they hit 5GB and become subject to ratio requirements. Older files are harder to make a profit off of, so users avoid downloading them outside of free leech. Users with slow internet connections have less earning potential and they work more as a result.
Altering the ratio system so that older files cost less to download would be an improvement, but it is still a bandaid. Ratios are centrally planned economies in disguise: the digital equivalent of setting the price of every book in the world at $0.01 per page.
What do we actually want in this system? Well, newly released movies cost me more to buy or rent than they do when that movie has been out for a few years. Great art costs more than mediocre art. Every member of a torrent’s swarm has their own optimization to solve:
Seeders and leechers should negotiate spot prices with each other depending on the content and timing. This wouldn’t be a mandatory part of the experience; sensible defaults and automated torrent clients could make it seamless. Still, I’m sure that people uploading new popular content to private torrent trackers would want to manually put a premium on the file for the first downloaders. Likewise, someone seeding a very old file might be willing to transfer a file at half price if the alternative is not earning any upload credit at all.
If it looks like a duck, swims like a duck, and quacks like a duck, then it probably is a duck. Private BitTorrent communities are closed economies with bad centrally planned pricing. They are a huge improvement on top of public trackers because we’re comparing a poorly coordinated economy against pure tragedy of the commons. When we try to tune the market mechanisms of a BitTorrent community, the result sure looks like a protocol token. After reading this paper, I’m pretty convinced it quacks like one too.
If you liked this post, follow me on twitter. I’ll be writing more on p2p and blockchain.
Private BitTorrent trackers are markets
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