Credit investments test: donate 1 TByte anonymously

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Credit investments going live:

Ability to Donate 1TByte of disk space to the community and get top download priority.
Critically depends on ticket: #5 and to lesser extend #21.
An undersupply detection mechanism seeks out swarms which are low on seeders.
The investment function download parts of these swarms and engages in partial seeding to earn credit. Seeding is done anonymously through proxies, critical dependency with #22.

Test idea: Tribler automatically fills 100MByte of disk, can be disabled on front-screen.

First test version is limited to few thousand Libswift test swarms which are included in Tribler and seeded. Desired outcome of the test is evenly spread out partial seeding. If we do artificial repeated downloads from 1 swarm, we boost demand and peers should see this as an attractive investment.

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First version of credits investment was functional as of November 2013.

Our system automatically seeks out undersupplied swarms (poorly seeded), joins them and donates upload bandwidth to them. The health of poorly seeded swarms is improved significantly if such a system was widely deployed.

This work is tied to our bandwidth accounting and cybercurrency work. As uploading to Tribler peers will yield a proof-of-work certificate.

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The operational branch from November 2013: https://github.com/egbertbouman/tribler/commits/channel_boosting

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Due to the exit node problem, this has become a critical issue.

[Baigle-zz]

I can help provide 1TB, though I will be limited on the async upload speed. If it proves to be very successful and help is still needed then I can do some upgrading.

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The core of the credit mining branch: https://github.com/egbertbouman/tribler/blob/channel_boosting/Tribler/Policies/BoostingManager.py
Task: scheduling Bandwidth and storage

Solve: hit-and-run behavior (avoid tragedy of the commons, 1968 problem)

Schedule and balance: relay bandwidth, own downloads/streams, speculative downloads, free storage space, and credit mining income.

Credit mining inputs: age of swarm, random scheduling, Similarity Function, and co-investor detection.

Reading
Operational mechanism for credit mining, with simplistic policies
Performance analysis of anonymous relaying
Proven positive power of credits (sharing ratio enforcement)

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@ardhipoetra All yours for 9 months:-)

[ardhipoetra]

As I mentioned in #21, these are the ingredients that may be used for Terabyte seeding :

• Collection of torrents and logs : my dropbox
• Collection of .torrents only (14248), zipped. Will be in bbq soon (I hope)
• The crawler (can be extended to facilitate other site) : https://github.com/ardhipoetra/legal-torrent-crawler
• Channel (currently only holds 3000 torrents) : 822e5c3fb617164133d242f0cccebab609d80974 (name : Legal torrent collection). For channel, I keep it in my local machine.

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In November 2013 we had the first credit mining code. We now re-visited this feature as part of our micro-economy work. The general major re-factor work of Tribler in general is paying off. Screenshot shows live boosting of a selected torrent channel subscription with several MBytes per second. Tribler shown here is beginning to discover swarms, investing in certain swarms, and beginning to earn a modest amount of credits by uploading in 1 swarm. Note, credits are only earned by uploading to other Tribler users or other compatible clients. Low-res: