Decentralized storage networks offer services with intriguing possibilities to reduce inequalities in an extremely centralized market. The challenge is to conceive incentives that are fair in regard to the income distribution among peers. Despite many systems using tokens to incentivize forwarding data, like Swarm, little is known about the interplay between incentives, storage-, and network-parameters. This paper aims to help fill this gap by developing Tit-for-Token (Tit4Tok), a framework to understand fairness. Tit4Tok realizes a triad of altruism (acts of kindness such as debt forgiveness), reciprocity (Tit-for-Tat's mirroring cooperation), and monetary rewards as desired in the free market. Tit4Tok sheds light on incentives across the accounting and settlement layers. We present a comprehensive exploration of different factors when incentivized peers share bandwidth in a libp2p-based network, including uneven distributions emerging when gateways provide data to users outside the network. We quantified the Income-Fairness with the Gini coefficient, using multiple model instantiations and diverse approaches for debt cancellation. We propose regular changes to the gateway neighborhood and show that our shuffling method improves the Income-Fairness from 0.66 to 0.16. We quantified the non-negligible cost of tolerating free-riding (altruism). The performance is evaluated by extensive computer simulations and using an IPFS workload to study the effects of caching.

翻译：去中心化存储网络提供的服务在减少高度集中化市场的不平等性方面具有引人入胜的潜力。其挑战在于设计能够公平分配节点间收入的激励措施。尽管许多系统（如Swarm）使用代币激励数据转发，但关于激励、存储参数与网络参数之间相互作用的认知仍然有限。本文旨在通过开发Tit-for-Token（Tit4Tok）框架来填补这一空白，以理解公平性。Tit4Tok实现了利他主义（如债务减免等善意行为）、互惠性（以牙还牙策略的协作镜像）以及自由市场所期望的货币奖励三者之间的统一。该框架揭示了会计层与结算层激励机制的运作机理。我们全面探究了在基于libp2p的网络中，当受激励节点共享带宽时不同因素的影响，包括网关向网络外部用户提供数据时产生的不均衡分布。通过多种模型实例化与债务取消策略，我们利用基尼系数量化了收入公平性。我们提出对网关邻域进行定期调整，实验表明该重排方法可将收入公平性从0.66提升至0.16。同时量化了容忍搭便车行为（利他主义）所产生的不可忽视成本。通过大规模计算机仿真及IPFS工作负载测试，我们评估了缓存效应下的系统性能。