In the first example that we saw, there were no network primitives, no packets going out. The resource bound was totally irrelevant in that context.
In the second example, the program always gave all of its current resource bound to an outgoing packet. Between the local and remote hosts, the packet might traverse a number of hops, and the resource bound will be decremented before each hop. The initial amount of resource bound given to the packet must be enough to take it to the remote host and get it back. In the example, we assumed that the packet would not take more than 30 hops on each leg, so we gave it a total of 60 units of resource bound initially.