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I'm not a blockchain expert, but I don't think it would help in this case. Blockchains are for creating a valid, secure public ledger of transactions. I don't t

I'm not a blockchain expert, but I don't think it would help in this case. Blockchains are for creating a valid, secure public ledger of transactions. I don't think you want to keep an accurate public log of everything you torrent ;) You probably want something more like Tor. However Tor's design makes it no good for large transactions thanks to all the obfuscating hops. There's always a price to pay when attempting to secure something... the trick is making design decisions such that the price is negligible. (Think HTTPS)

problems 9y ago
I think what he's more talking about is something more akin to a distributed search system than a blockchain - you could make the magnet links last forever in a blockchain, but that doesn't really make sense if no one holds the files anymore you're just keeping useless links around and storing them on every single node for no reason. A search DHT makes much more sense, look up keywords based on hash. Think the Kademlia network from the ED2K days. Maybe I'm being too academic by even suggesting a DHT be used, you could do it in simpler ways like flood search in the style of Gnutella - any distributed search means would work really. I believe there are a few attempts at this in the bittorrent world, like Tribler, which is probably the most practical implementation to date, there's a few others too, none of which look particularly mature yet: https://sourceforge.net/projects/aresgalaxy/editorial/?source=psp https://sourceforge.net/projects/aresgalaxy/editorial/?sourc... https://github.com/lmatteis/torrent-net https://github.com/lmatteis/torrent-net https://github.com/boramalper/magnetico https://github.com/boramalper/magnetico The problem with distributed search is that perfecting it is hard - bittorrent has won out because websites could be used to prevent spamming of malware, track reputation and discussion of torrents and individuals, etc. Tribler has some proposed alternatives here and I seem to remember Kad having done a decent job preventing this from becoming a significant problem, but it never had the popularity. If someone manages to knock out all the big torrent and usenet indexes overnight, these systems will become a lot more necessary and probably get a lot more popular.

problems 9y ago

I think what he's more talking about is something more akin to a distributed search system than a blockchain - you could make the magnet links last forever in a blockchain, but that doesn't really make sense if no one holds the files anymore you're just keeping useless links around and storing them on every single node for no reason. A search DHT makes much more sense, look up keywords based on hash. Think the Kademlia network from the ED2K days. Maybe I'm being too academic by even suggesting a DHT be used, you could do it in simpler ways like flood search in the style of Gnutella - any distributed search means would work really. I believe there are a few attempts at this in the bittorrent world, like Tribler, which is probably the most practical implementation to date, there's a few others too, none of which look particularly mature yet: https://sourceforge.net/projects/aresgalaxy/editorial/?source=psp https://sourceforge.net/projects/aresgalaxy/editorial/?sourc... https://github.com/lmatteis/torrent-net https://github.com/lmatteis/torrent-net https://github.com/boramalper/magnetico https://github.com/boramalper/magnetico The problem with distributed search is that perfecting it is hard - bittorrent has won out because websites could be used to prevent spamming of malware, track reputation and discussion of torrents and individuals, etc. Tribler has some proposed alternatives here and I seem to remember Kad having done a decent job preventing this from becoming a significant problem, but it never had the popularity. If someone manages to knock out all the big torrent and usenet indexes overnight, these systems will become a lot more necessary and probably get a lot more popular.