Very interesting. Beyond ideological motivation, I’m curious what the long-term incentive is for someone to run a peer.

For example, if Freenet were to reach scale, it could eventually need some kind of economic primitive around it. Something similar to how Filecoin handles decentralized storage, but for app state. One way to do this could be paying peers to keep app state available, serve it reliably, etc. and prove they are doing so.

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nine_k 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Why would you want to exchange private messages with anonymous counterparties?

- You participate in a secret cabal, and don't want participants' identities be visible to each other.

- You're a journalist, and want to give your informants in sensitive matters, or from oppressed countries, a way to securely interact with you, so that you won't be technically capable of reporting their identities.

- You're selling illegal goods or services.

I'd say that in the first two cases I would consider running a separate copy of the network, because it apparently involves one supernode, and I might want to control the supernode (or maybe not).

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sanity 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Our intention is that Freenet will only consume surplus resources, but we plan to build a reputation system that could have a notion of "karma" that is earned by providing resources to the network. This karma could be used to gate access to resources, for example like a VIP chat room on River.

So there are a lot of possibilities but for now users are motivated by a desire to see the network succeed, and that seems to be a sufficient motivator at our current scale.

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alun 4 hours ago | parent [-]

Seems reasonable to build a cryptocurrency around this. The network could pay the cryptocurrency out to users dedicating resources. Have you thought about that?

	▲	Groxx 2 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Ghostkeys seem like part of a decent approach to this, since it's a "prove contribution without dictating how" system. Crypto/cash/"they gave me a high five, they're cool" are all equally valid, and it's not a proof of work that costs substantial money to operate: https://freenet.org/ghostkey/ Currently it appears centralized, but in principle it'd be pretty easy to shift it to a web of trust instead, and hosts can choose what they allow and how much they value it. (zero-knowledge proofs seem probably rather important to adopt tho, as right now it'll tie you to a stable pseudonym)
	▲	sanity 4 hours ago \| parent \| prev \| next [-]
		You'd still need to solve the double-spend problem, because while contract state on Freenet will usually synchronize within a few seconds, it isn't guaranteed to converge to a single globally consistent state. Freenet's approach works well for things like group chat, where temporary inconsistency is mostly just an irritation, but for a cryptocurrency it is fatal. I'm not saying you couldn't build a cryptocurrency on Freenet, but you'd still need a solution to that problem.
	▲	thrance 3 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Cryptocurrencies have a toxic reputation. Associating one to this project is a sure path to killing it.