given the context of this article, if you ever get the chance to study the economics of private torrent trackers, i think you’d find it interesting.
every private tracker ends up with an economy of some sort: users have to upload so many bytes if they want to continue downloading bytes; certain content might be gated to users who have only uploaded so many bytes… but there’s always a way to get those credits without actually uploading bytes: submitting new torrents, reviewing new torrents, seeding inactive torrents to keep that content alive, etc.
naturally, many trackers frequently run donation drives. you can be sure the hosting costs for most trackers isn’t really $50,000/year. yet any successful tracker can bring more than that in via “donations”. the trick, of course, is that these “donations” serve to tie the internal economy to the global economy: you can expect to get some form of upload credits in exchange for your donation.
but the point here is that this is exactly your micropayment ecosystem: only it’s seamless enough (and at certain key points obscured by plausible cover stories) that casual users might not comprehend that they’re making micropayments every time they download a file.
every private tracker ends up with an economy of some sort: users have to upload so many bytes if they want to continue downloading bytes; certain content might be gated to users who have only uploaded so many bytes… but there’s always a way to get those credits without actually uploading bytes: submitting new torrents, reviewing new torrents, seeding inactive torrents to keep that content alive, etc.
naturally, many trackers frequently run donation drives. you can be sure the hosting costs for most trackers isn’t really $50,000/year. yet any successful tracker can bring more than that in via “donations”. the trick, of course, is that these “donations” serve to tie the internal economy to the global economy: you can expect to get some form of upload credits in exchange for your donation.
but the point here is that this is exactly your micropayment ecosystem: only it’s seamless enough (and at certain key points obscured by plausible cover stories) that casual users might not comprehend that they’re making micropayments every time they download a file.