Talk:The World of Peer-to-Peer (P2P)/All Chapters

Refs: Clay Shirky

Clay Shirky (google) has written a lot about peer to peer. Things like The Case Against Micropayments are relevant. But I'm specifically thinking about the argument that leechers are simply irrelevant. Because despite neo-con arguments that peer to peer is unfeasible and tragedy of the commons and all that crap, the fact is that bandwidth is not an exhaustible resource. It's a perpetually renewing resource. Or more accurately, it's not something you can save up or waste. Yes, a person may leech from me or I may leech from someone else, but it actually doesn't matter since the bandwidth "wasted" is gone anyways and if someone hasn't used it by now then nobody can. There's also the argument that it's better to be leeched off from directly than for the leecher to leech from the central server that I'm getting my own stuff from. My upload bandwidth is gone either way, but by being leeched off from then I get a faster download rate.

Anyways, this should be written up better and put into the leech section.