Thursday, August 2
PC Forum 2001 Transcript Cory Doctorow, OpenCola We've heard a lot of talk about the "tragedy of the commons" and the "cornucopia of the commons" in the context of peer-to-peer architectures. The interesting thing about the commons in a P2P network is that it's full of cows that shit grass - every cow that grazes the commons provisions the resource that it's grazing. It's like Metcalfe's Law, squared. [Robert Metcalfe noted that the value of a network grows as n-squared, where n is the number of users.] Not only does the network gain value because more people are connected to it, it gains capacity. I think that's a really radical departure from any architecture we've seen so far.
