The objective of any incentive system for peer-to-peer content distribution is to encourage cooperative behaviour and discourage free-riding: the uncompensated depletion of limited resources.
The incentive strategy outlined here aspires to satisfy the following constraints:
- it is in the node’s own interest, regardless of whether or not other nodes follow it. - it must be expensive to expend the resources of other nodes. - it does not impose unreasonable overhead - it plays nice with "naive" nodes - it rewards those that play nice, including those following this strategy
In the context of Swarm, storage and bandwidth are the two most important scarce resources, and this is reflected in our incentives scheme.