A Nested Incentive Scheme for Distributed File Sharing Systems

In the distributed file sharing system, a large number of users share bandwidth, upload resources and store them in a decentralized manner, thus offering both an abundant supply of high-quality resources and high-speed download. However, some users only enjoy the convenient service without uploading or sharing, which is called free riding. Free-riding may discourage other honest users. When free-riding users mount to a certain number, the platform may fail to work. The current available incentive mechanisms, such as reciprocal incentive mechanisms and reputation-based incentive mechanisms, which suffer simple incentive models, inability to achieve incentive circulation and dependence on a third-party trusted agency, are unable to completely solve the free-riding problem.In this paper we build a blockchain-based distributed file sharing platform and design a nested incentive scheme for this platform. The proposed nested incentive mechanism achieves the circulation of incentives in the platform and does not rely on any trusted third parties for incentive distribution, thus providing a better solution to free-riding. Our distributed file sharing platform prototype is built on the current mainstream blockchain. Nested incentive scheme experiments on this platform verify the effectiveness and superiority of our incentive scheme in solving the free-riding problem compared to other schemes.