Influences on cooperation in BitTorrent communities
Proceedings of the 2005 ACM SIGCOMM workshop on Economics of peer-to-peer systems
Optimizing scrip systems: efficiency, crashes, hoarders, and altruists
Proceedings of the 8th ACM conference on Electronic commerce
Resource demand and supply in BitTorrent content-sharing communities
Computer Networks: The International Journal of Computer and Telecommunications Networking
Peer-assisted content distribution with prices
CoNEXT '08 Proceedings of the 2008 ACM CoNEXT Conference
Antfarm: efficient content distribution with managed swarms
NSDI'09 Proceedings of the 6th USENIX symposium on Networked systems design and implementation
BitTorrent or BitCrunch: Evidence of a Credit Squeeze in BitTorrent?
WETICE '09 Proceedings of the 2009 18th IEEE International Workshops on Enabling Technologies: Infrastructures for Collaborative Enterprises
INFOCOM'10 Proceedings of the 29th conference on Information communications
Understanding and Improving Ratio Incentives in Private Communities
ICDCS '10 Proceedings of the 2010 IEEE 30th International Conference on Distributed Computing Systems
Public and private BitTorrent communities: a measurement study
IPTPS'10 Proceedings of the 9th international conference on Peer-to-peer systems
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Over the years, private file-sharing communities built on the BitTorrent protocol have developed their own policies and mechanisms for motivating members to share content and contribute resources. By requiring members to maintain a minimum ratio between uploads and downloads, private communities effectively establish credit systems, and with them full-fledged economies. We report on a half-year-long measurement study of DIME -- a community for sharing live concert recordings -- that sheds light on the economic forces affecting users in such communities. A key observation is that while the download of files is priced only according to the size of the file, the rate of return for seeding new files is significantly greater than for seeding old files. We find via a natural experiment that users react to such differences in resale value by preferentially consuming older files during a 'free leech' period. We consider implications of these finding on a user's ability to earn credits and meet ratio enforcements, focusing in particular on the relationship between visitation frequency and wealth and on low bandwidth users. We then share details from an interview with DIME moderators, which highlights the goals of the community based on which we make suggestions for possible improvement.