Fair trading of information: a proposal for the economics of peer-to-peer systems

A P2P currency can be a powerful tool for promoting exchanges in a trusted way that make use of under-utilized resources both in computer networks and in real life. There are three classes of resource that can be exchanged in a P2P system: atoms (ex. physical goods by way of auctions), bits (ex. data files) and presences (ex. time slots for computing resources such as CPU, storage or bandwidth). If these are equally treated as commodities, however, the economy of the system is likely to collapse, because data files can be reproduced at a negligibly small cost whereas time slots for computing resources cannot even be stockpiled for future use. This paper clarifies this point by simulating a small world of traders, and proposes a novel way for applying the "reduction over time" feature of i-WAT, a P2P currency. In the proposed new economic order (NEO), bits are freely shared among participants, whereas their producers are supported by peers, being given freedom to issue exchange tickets whose values are reduced over time.