It's not designed to be dollars or euros. The prices themselves are meant to represent the costs of activity within this network, which is a fluctuating amount. Most users will start running their Mojo Nation broker and earn tokens for performing work, which they can then redeem. So it's not trying to put a price on any particular activity; it's just trying to keep score.

But what, for example, are most of the beta testers earning by offering their computer's unused processing power for a day?

It depends on supply and demand. But it's the kind of thing where if you make your computer available during the day, then at night you can download as much content as you want.

If you're a porn user, for example, and you run the agent all day -- connected on a broadband PC -- than you can download one or two of these 10-to-15 minute movie clips. Right now, though, we're just throwing numbers around because it really depends on the market.

So let's walk through the process. Say someone has some Mojo tokens and they want to buy a file. Who prices it? The person who uploaded the file?

Yes and no. One person doesn't have an entire file. Part of the design of Mojo Nation is that every file is actually broken up into hundreds or even thousands of pieces. So if you wanted to download a file from this system, your [Mojo Nation software] agent would go out into this marketplace and try to buy these blocks. The people holding the data don't know what they're holding. So they can't say, for example, Oh, that's a file I know that Damien wants later, so I'll up the price on that. All of the agents just see it as abstract chunks of data being passed around.

So your agent would go into that marketplace, it would find those servers that are advertising ranges that cover blocks you're looking for and then it would try to buy them. The key is that in Mojo Nation, you don't pay someone for holding a block -- you pay them for delivering it to you.

What about customer service? What happens, for instance, if I get only half a song? Do I have to pay for it?

You only have to pay for what you downloaded. You would have to pay for the chunk you downloaded. You wouldn't have the whole file, so you couldn't decrypt it or get it to run -- but you would still have to pay the agents because no one knows you downloaded this piece of content and couldn't find all of it. They don't care. All they're charging you for is the service they gave you.

Sounds like there's a high potential for unhappy customers -- people who paid for something they didn't get ...

Yes. But you would probably be more unhappy that you couldn't download a file -- couldn't get the piece of music -- than the fact that you would have spent two one-thousandths of a cent trying to download a piece.

So Mojo Nation doesn't guarantee what you download or verify the content to make sure it's of high quality?

No. But on the other hand, it's like the real world. There are probably 10 million or 100 million shoe stores, but I only patronize a couple -- people who have given me good service in the past, people who are local to me. And agents that are running are always gathering this information: who's close to me, who has good connectivity, who's always up when I go looking and who's actually got the inventory when I want to buy it. The agent uses these background reputations to keep track of where to go to next. The agent does all of this on its own.

Give me an example: a song. How many Mojo does it cost and who gets paid for it?

It will cost about 10,000 Mojo to download a song. The people who get paid are those who perform the services, so those agents that helped direct you to find that block get paid. The distributed search agents get paid. All of the different block servers that you purchased blocks from get paid, and if the user was running through a relay server, either because they were behind a firewall or because they wanted to protect their privacy, the person passing those messages would also get a cut.

How are the cuts allocated?

Everyone advertises their prices, and they compete with each other based on price and quality of service.

So the ultimate price paid is just the sum of all the services needed to get it?

Right. And the price will lower as the network grows and faster connections come online.

How does Mojo Nation and Autonomous Zone Industries make money through this process?

As the bank, we earn a small percentage of Mojo-to-dollar transactions or dollar-to-Mojo transactions. We act as a market maker: There are some people who will end up with a surplus of Mojo -- they will contribute more than they download. There are lot of people who will end up with a deficit of Mojo. We will put the two parties together and basically let them buy and sell on our Mojo market, and we'll take a small percentage.

At the moment it's 2 percent. It's only for dollar-to-Mojo transactions. If you put $10 of Mojo into the system and keep using it and using it, you never pay the fee.

This particular software is also very adept at using IT resources. Look around an office at how many systems are left idle. So Autonomous Zone Industries -- the parent company -- will license the software, which will allow the company to perform internal online backups, to run their own intranet server off their own machines, to store the local documents they want and also go into the public market to buy and sell resources. It will be a B2B marketplace, and the consumer marketplace [of Mojo Nation] will only be a component of that.

What about the selling side of the equation: How does the content get onto the Mojo Nation network?

Users have to publish data to Mojo Nation. It's not a strict file-sharing service like Napster. In most file-sharing systems, the agent looks through your system and says, "What have I got, and whatever I've got, I'll make available."

The other alternative is a publication system, like Mojo Nation or Freenet. In these systems, you have to actively put data into the network. It isn't passively pulled in. Someone has to publish the file.

Autonomous Zone Industries is incorporated in the Caymans. Where does this fit into your legal plans?

We're not sure. We created this company for doing cryptography exporting [back in 1993]. Then they changed the rules on that and we were about to move back into the United States when the whole Napster case started. And we thought, Well, we'll keep this just in case. It's a useful artifact. In fact, for the first time in my life, I think I'm really glad that the U.S. had these onerous crypto laws. It's ironic and very bizarre.

But being in the Caymans -- it helps, but we're not relying on it for our legal defense.

Ultimately, you've got a lot of faith in human nature, particularly when augmented by financial incentives. What will you do if you're wrong and the world disappoints you?

There are weaknesses. Copyright, for example, is a problem that has a lot of different sides to it: technical, legal and social. We proposed tipping as a solution, and we have a technical solution to put that in place, and we'll require the participation of others to handle the legal stuff. And then socially, we need to teach people.

To be honest, though, we don't have all of the answers. In the long run I think it's going to work. If not, I'll go back to being a perpetual tourist. For me this is a really cool idea that's been eating away at the back of my mind for several years, and I've decided to finally do it. And I think that the time is right and it's going to take off. If not, it's always out there. The source is available and maybe it will be the seed; it will catch on eventually because it is the best way to use these resources.

The Free Software Project
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