A Lightweight Currency Paradigm for the P2P Resource Market
David Andrew Turner, Keith W. Ross · 2004
A P2P resource market is a market in which peers trade resources (including storage, bandwidth and CPU cycles) and services with each other. We propose a specific paradigm for a P2P resource market. This paradigm has five key components: (i) pairwise trading market, with peers setting their own prices for offered resources; (ii) multiple currency economy, in which any peer can issue its own currency; (iii) no legal recourse, thereby limiting the transaction costs in trades; (iv) a simple, secure application-layer protocol; and (v) entity identification based on the entity's unique public key. We argue that the paradigm can lead to a flourishing P2P resource market, allowing applications to tap into the huge pool of surplus peer resources. We illustrate the paradigm and its corresponding Lightweight Currency Protocol (LCP) with several application examples.