It naturally puts one in Mind of a Newgate Anecdote. One of the Prisoners complain’d that in the Night somebody had taken his Buckles out of his Shoes. What the Devil, says another, have we then Thieves among us? It must not be suffer’d. Let us search out the Rogue, and pump him to death.
To gauge the prevalence of free riding, the 2000 study analyzed Pong and QueryHit messages (see the "Gnutella 0.4" sidebar for more information about Gnutella messages). The study found that 66 percent of peers shared no files at all, while 73 percent shared 10 or fewer files. Additionally, Adar and Huberman observed that a very small proportion of the peers are responsible for the vast majority of the sharing: the top 1 percent of sharing peers accounted for 47 percent of all QueryHits, and the top 25 percent of these peers