Mnet is software to run a

peer-to-peer Peer-to-peer (P2P) computing or networking is a distributed application architecture that partitions tasks or workloads between peers. Peers are equally privileged, equipotent participants in the network. They are said to form a peer-to-peer n ...

distributed data store A distributed data store is a computer network where information is stored on more than one node, often in a replicated fashion. It is usually specifically used to refer to either a distributed database where users store information on a ''numb ...

for

file sharing File sharing is the practice of distributing or providing access to digital media, such as computer programs, multimedia (audio, images and video), documents or electronic books. Common methods of storage, transmission and dispersion include r ...

purpose. It aimed at substituting free sharing of digital resources, typical of P2P networks, with a market regulated by its own currency. Mnet is a fork of the software MojoNation.

Evil Geniuses for a Better Tomorrow

Evil Geniuses for a Better Tomorrow was a

startup company A startup or start-up is a company or project undertaken by an entrepreneur to seek, develop, and validate a scalable business model. While entrepreneurship refers to all new businesses, including self-employment and businesses that never intend t ...

founded by Jim McCoy et al. to create

MojoNation Mnet is software to run a peer-to-peer distributed data store for file sharing purpose. It aimed at substituting free sharing of digital resources, typical of P2P networks, with a market regulated by its own currency. Mnet is a fork of the soft ...

. The company's name comes from the game

Illuminati The Illuminati (; plural of Latin ''illuminatus'', 'enlightened') is a name given to several groups, both real and fictitious. Historically, the name usually refers to the Bavarian Illuminati, an Enlightenment-era secret society founded on ...

Steve Jackson Games Steve Jackson Games (SJGames) is a game company, founded in 1980 by Steve Jackson, that creates and publishes role-playing, board, and card games, and (until 2019) the gaming magazine ''Pyramid''. History Founded in 1980, six years after the cr ...

. After several years, the company ran out of money and laid off most of its employees;

Bram Cohen Bram Cohen is an American computer programmer, best known as the author of the peer-to-peer (P2P) BitTorrent protocol in 2001, as well as the first file sharing program to use the protocol, also known as BitTorrent. He is also the co-founder of ...

went on to create BitTorrent and

Zooko Wilcox-O'Hearn Zooko Wilcox-O'Hearn (born Bryce Wilcox; 13 May 1974 in Phoenix, Arizona), is an American Colorado-based computer security specialist, self-proclaimed cypherpunk, and CEO of the Electric Coin Company (ECC), a for-profit company leading the develo ...

created Mnet out of MojoNation's source code and contributed later to the

Tahoe-LAFS Tahoe-LAFS (Tahoe Least-Authority File Store) is a free and open, secure, decentralized, fault-tolerant, distributed data store and distributed file system. It can be used as an online backup system, or to serve as a file or Web host similar to ...

. Mojonation ceased operation as a commercial enterprise in February 2002, when it was replaced by the noncommercial Mnet project.

MojoNation

At the time it was first publicly released, MojoNation included several notable features:

Evil Geniuses Transport Protocol (EGTP)

EGTP is a general-purpose P2P messaging protocol, comparable in scope to

JXTA JXTA (Juxtapose) was an open-source peer-to-peer protocol specification begun by Sun Microsystems in 2001. The JXTA protocols were defined as a set of XML messages which allow any device connected to a network to exchange messages and collabora ...

, but it was released in a working state before Jxta was even announced. EGTP provides persistent identities (based on public-key cryptography) for nodes,

end-to-end encryption End-to-end encryption (E2EE) is a system of communication where only the communicating users can read the messages. In principle, it prevents potential eavesdroppers – including telecom providers, Internet providers, malicious actors, and even ...

, message relaying to get through NATs and firewalls, pluggable transports (called "communication strategies" or "commstrats" for short), and an efficient marshaling format (mencoding, similar to the bencoding later used in BitTorrent). EGTP allows arbitrary protocols to be built on top of it; the MojoNation application was composed of several request-response services (described below) that ran on EGTP.

Mojo Economy

Mojo was a

digital cash Digital currency (digital money, electronic money or electronic currency) is any currency, money, or money-like asset that is primarily managed, stored or exchanged on digital computer systems, especially over the internet. Types of digital cu ...

currency that aimed to provide attack resistance and load balancing in a fully distributed and incentive-compatible way (see

Agoric computing A smart contract is a computer program or a transaction protocol that is intended to automatically execute, control or document events and actions according to the terms of a contract or an agreement. The objectives of smart contracts are the re ...

). Every pair of MojoNation nodes maintained a relative credit balance, with every EGTP request transferring some Mojo credit from the sender to the receiver. Once the absolute value of the debt between two nodes exceeded the size of a Mojo token, the side with the negative balance would transfer a token to the other, clearing out the debt. Because transferring a token was a relatively heavyweight event, tokens were worth 20,000 (?) Mojo. A MojoNation component called the token server acted as the mint, allowing MojoNation nodes to securely transfer Mojo. In early versions of MojoNation, users were required to set prices for any services their node provided. Most users had no idea how to choose prices, so the Mojo layer was rewritten to use a second-price rolling

auction An auction is usually a process of buying and selling goods or services by offering them up for bids, taking bids, and then selling the item to the highest bidder or buying the item from the lowest bidder. Some exceptions to this definition ex ...

. Each node maintained a queue of incoming requests that had not yet been processed, sorted by a bid field contained in each request. Requests were serviced in order, from highest to lowest bids. This shifted the burden of pricing decisions from servers to clients: each user could set a price he was willing to pay for services, and his node would offer that bid in outgoing requests. This scheme was intended to create a simple feedback loop: if the system is responding slowly, increase your bid and if the system is responding quickly, decrease it.

File Publishing System

The only application built on the EGTP/Mojo framework was a distributed file publishing system. Users could publish files, which would be stored on other MojoNation nodes. During the publishing process, the file was encrypted and redundantly encoded into many small blocks using an

information dispersal algorithm Information is an abstract concept that refers to that which has the power to inform. At the most fundamental level information pertains to the interpretation of that which may be sensed. Any natural process that is not completely random, ...

. These blocks were then uploaded to any nodes that were running the "block server" service. Publishing a file generated a unique identifier (similar to a

Freenet Freenet is a peer-to-peer platform for censorship-resistant, anonymous communication. It uses a decentralized distributed data store to keep and deliver information, and has a suite of free software for publishing and communicating on the Web ...

SSK) that was required to download and decrypt the file. If the user wished a file to be publicly available, he could send the identifier to a "content tracker" service. Downloading files is the reverse of the publishing process: a user either sends a query to a content tracker and gets a list of identifiers in response or obtains a file identifier out of band, then asks block servers for the appropriate blocks, and then inverts the IDA and encryption algorithms to recover the original file. Unlike file sharing systems (which never send any data over the network unless it has been requested), most file publishing systems (with the exception of BitTorrent) have not attracted large numbers of users.

References

External links

Official Mnet web site (archived in 2012)

Mnet project page on SourceForge
*
Mojo Nation project page on SourceForge
{{DEFAULTSORT:Mnet (Peer-To-Peer Network) File sharing networks Free file transfer software Distributed data storage systems