A couple months ago I wrote up some of the edges that I’ve encountered in thinking about how to structure decentralized data transfer systems. These are an extension of the limitations that were initially encountered in bittorrent style tit-for-tat exchanges, and have now matured into a much more extensive field looking at incentives and other mechanisms that can be leveraged to create robust systems.
See the long-form essay on mirror
My top take-away from this line of thought is that it does seem like within our initial framing of how data transfer might happen we end up still relying on reputation as a way to estimate transferability of experience, and in estimating trust for whether past behavior will continue to subsequent performance.