Quote - This would mean the bandwidth problem would go away.

Fair point - though you resolve the big issue of when theres no internet connection?

You're thinking about something in a way I'm not seeing. How would you be using a commercial render farm to set up a render, yet you have no internet connection? I thought we were talking about using a render farm and the problem of passing tons of data to the farm. My suggestion of not passing the data, but just proving you could, would avoid having to move the data.

Quote - I've bought stuff before that needs to be authenticated online when installing.  Gone to reinstall and they've either gone bust. Or worse still decided  they don't want anyone to use that version anymore, you have to pay extra. Simple serial number ? No problem.

Again, we're not speaking about the same scenario as I do not understand what you're talking about. I suggested that you prove, via digital signature (like a serial number but more sophisticated) that you have the right to use certain content on the remote render farm without actually transmitting it. This has nothing whatsoever to do with the vendor - he/she can be out of the picture altogether. This is similar to those strategies involving add-ons to V4 that do not involve actually transmitting a copy of V4. The user must already have a copy.

This is not unlike proving who you are using public key cryptographic signatures. It's a strategy where you prove you are who you say you are (or in this case you have what you say you have) by doing a math calculation that could be done by nobody else, but can be verified by everybody.

This notion of avoiding transmission of a file that is already on the server (stored there by somebody other than you, sometime in the past) is called deduplication. It is a strategy employed by DropBox to avoid uploading files that they already got from somebody else. If you attempt to upload a song you own, for example, and somebody else already uploaded the same song (and they own it too, presumably) then the server tells your PC "never mind, I got that already" and it just marks you down as owning a copy of it at the server. You still have your local copy, but you never need to send it again.

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Renderosity forum reply notifications are wonky. If I read a follow-up in a thread, but I don't myself reply, then notifications no longer happen AT ALL on that thread. So if I seem to be ignoring a question, that's why. (Updated September 23, 2019)