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Internet bandwidth could become a global currency under a proposed model for the future of e-commerce that exploits a novel peer-to-peer video sharing application designed by a trans-Atlantic team of computer scientists.

Researchers from Delft University of Technology and Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam and Harvard's School of Engineering and Applied Sciences are using this application to explore a next-generation model for safe and legal electronic commerce that uses Internet bandwidth as a global currency.

The application, available for free download at http://TV.seas.harvard.edu, is an enhanced version of a program called Tribler, originally created by the Dutch collaborators to study video file sharing.

"Successful peer-to-peer systems rely on designing rules that promote fair sharing of resources amongst users. Thus, they are both efficient and powerful computational and economic systems," David Parkes, John L. Loeb Associate Professor of the Natural Sciences at Harvard said. "Peer-to-peer has received a bad rap, however, because of its frequent association with illegal music or software downloads."

The researchers were inspired to use a version of the Tribler video sharing software as a model for an e-commerce system because of such flexibility, speed, and reliability.

"Our platform will provide fast downloads by ensuring sufficient uploads," explains Johan Pouwelse, an assistant professor at Delft University of Technology and the technical director of Tribler. "The next generation of peer-to-peer systems will provide an ideal marketplace not just for content, but for bandwidth in general."

The researchers envision an e-commerce model that connects users to a single global market, without any controlling company, network, or bank with bandwidth as the first true Internet "currency" for such a market.

They are proposing earn-and-spend market model, where the more a user uploads now and the higher the quality of the contributions, the more she would be able to download later and the faster the download speed.

The enhanced Tribler goes beyond traditional P2P applications such as BitTorrent by implementing proper regulation in a decentralized environment, which the researchers concede is the greatest challenge to any peer-to-peer backed e-commerce system.

Another idea the researchers believe has enormous but untapped potential is the combination of social network technology with peer-to-peer systems.

"In the case of sharing and playing video, our network-based system already allows a group of 'friends' to pool their collective upload 'reserve' to slash download times. For Internet-based television this means a true instant, on-demand video experience," Pouwelse explained.

To monitor the virtual economy, Parkes and Pouwelse plan to creating a "web of trust," or a network between friends used to evaluate the trustworthiness of fellow users and aimed at preventing content theft, counterfeiting, and cyber attacks.

The enhanced version of the Tribler software accomplishes this to an extent by enabling users to "gossip" or report on the behavior of other peers.

The eventual goal of the research is to find a way to create accurate personal assessments or trust metrics as a form of internal regulation.

"This idea is not new, but previous implementations have been costly and are dependent on a company and/or website being the enforcer. Addressing the 'trust issue' within open peer-to-peer technology could lead to future online economies that are legal, dynamic and scaleable, have very low start-up costs, and minimal downtime," says Parkes.

By studying user behavior within an operational "Internet currency" system, with a particular focus on understanding how and why attacks, fraud, and abuse occur and how trust can be established and maintained, the researchers imagine future improvements to everything from on-demand television to online auctions to open content encyclopedias.