Self-recharging virtual currency
Market-based control is attractive for networked computing utilities in which consumers compete for shared resources (computers, storage, network bandwidth). This paper proposes a new self-recharging virtual currency model as a common medium of exchange in a computational market. The key idea is to recycle currency through the economy automatically while bounding the rate of spending by consumers. Currency budgets may be distributed among consumers according to any global policy; consumers spend their budgets to schedule their resource usage through time, but cannot hoard their currency or starve. We outline the design and rationale for self-recharging currency in Cereus, a system for market-based community resource sharing, in which participants are authenticated and sanctions are sufficient to discourage fraudulent behavior. Currency transactions in Cereus are accountable: offline third-party audits can detect and prove cheating, so participants may transfer and recharge currency autonomously without involvement of the trusted banking service. Copyright 2005 ACM.
