@reinisp said in Drive Pooling...:
I think we have come to a consensus.
Using the amount of free space to evaluate the host ratings does not guarantee anything (unless there is additional verification at signing contacting with renter, but then the original space reservation is redundant and unnecessary). But it stimulates the falsification of statistics by dishonest hosts and leads to centralization among honest ones.
If you are an honest host planning to rent only 1 TB, then an additional "spare" 4 TB (to avoid penalties and degradation of rating) actually worsen your spending / income ratio 5 times. But if you are a huge disk farm planning to rent out say 50 TB, then an additional 4 TB gives only 8% of overhead costs. This is the way to centralize resources. Although the stated objective of the project is directly opposite.
A sidenote, I think using compression or dedup for filesystems storing encrypted data is complete waste of resources.
And I still think that intentionally providing false numbers to get better score is cheating.
Yep, but only after space is filled with actual encrypted useful data received from the renter. Until this moment - it is a one of many ways to easily fake available space stats and get high rating in host queue - empty files compress almost to nothing and you can fill all space with other data while client will still think there is >4 TB of free space available on disk(s).
Yes, you can call it cheating. But it is a cheating on other (honest) hosts, not on renters. Dishonest advantage in the competition for contracts.
And only one reliable way to avoid this cheating is to make it meaningless my removing this stat from rating calculation.
Even filling empty files with random uncompressible data will not help much (but will cause huge slowdowns of client work). Because use of compression / deduplication is only one of ways to fake this data. There are another ways too. ANY variables calculated on local client side can be faked and it can't be trusted.
The host age and host uptime on the other hand are calculated by other clients independently and the host owner can not fake them in principle. Therefore, their use in the host rating calculation makes sense and useful.
