Transaction-based charging in Mnemosyne: A peer-to-peer steganographic storage system

Mnemosyne is a peer-to-peer steganographic storage system: one in which the existence of a user's files cannot be verified without a key. This paper applies the techniques used in Mnemosyne - erasure codes and anonymous block writing - to move most of the administrative overhead of a commercial storage service over to the client, resulting in cost savings for the service provider. The contribution of this paper is to present a radically alternative way of charging for storage services. In place of renting some amount of space for some period of time, systems like Mnemosyne allow more flexible billing models closer to those proposed for network bandwidth, including versions of congestion pricing. We show how a reliable, commercial storage service using is feasible, and examine the details of the tradeoff it offers compared with conventional storage services.