Here’s another scenario of how groups could use their collective resources.
Think of an AudioGalaxy-type genre-specific group whose members would be interested in sharing their new rips with each other. The members could announce their new offerings on a community bulletin board with introductory notes. As an individual member you could subscribe to all new albums, or just to albums from particular members (whose taste and rip quality you trust) or you could simply hand pick from the list the ones you would like to receive. A coordinator peer would keep track of all the subscriptions and when enough members would have expressed interest to a particular item the coordinator would launch a ‘group send’ for that album. This would quickly lead to several identical copies of the album (or rather its constituent data blocks) becoming temporarily available to the group members - a decentralized counterpart to centralized caching. The group could then utilize multisourcing from partially completed files to effectively cascade the material to all interested parties.
- tg
