Conclusions - Peer-to-Peer Computing: Applications, Architecture, Protocols, and Challenges - page 172

would probably need some “medium of exchange,” also known as “money”
in our physical world. However, such cyberspace “currency” could be totally
independent of and has nothing to do with our physical monetary system.
Much research needs to be done to realize this futuristic scenario. We do not
expect this to be far, though.
With a P2P economy in place, the architecture of the system would be
more robust because some peers would be “selling” infrastructure support
(i.e., forwarding bandwidth) so that a structured architecture could be revived
in many localized regions in the system, mimicking some “cities” in a human
being society. Thus, in the future, peers would form clusters and intra-cluster
topology would be highly structured, while inter-cluster topology would still
be unstructured or in the form of mesh.
Topology control, therefore, becomes a product of some tradings among
peers also. Specifically, some peers would be selling infrastructure support to
get file data in return (or through some medium of exchange in the process).
Incentive issues then are solved implicitly by the “market” forces, i.e., by
demand and supply. Indeed, a peer will be enticed to cooperate if it is given
some “commodities” in need for its service. On the other hand, some “services”
in peers would be eliminated by the market if there is little or even no demand
for them.
Autonomous trust among peers would still be a di cult problem to solve.
Perhaps this is because trust is really a hard-to-quantify notion. A possible
implementation could be based on fuzzy logic. Yet even if we use fuzzy logic,
we cannot do away with the inherent stochastic nature of trust, making it
possible to have erroneous actions.
As mentioned at the beginning of this section, even security resources such
as keys could be commodities for trade. Thus, security problems could also be
handled by the “market.”
Finally, a curious question is whether some form of “government” would
emerge. If so, its manifestation in a P2P system would defy the original pur-
pose of autonomous sharing/trading.