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> I borrow books constantly from the IA that are hard/impossible to find elsewhere because they've gone out of print. A lot of academic-ish non-fiction from the
by Algemarin 4y ago
> I borrow books constantly from the IA that are hard/impossible to find elsewhere because they've gone out of print. A lot of academic-ish non-fiction from the 1960s-1980s, stuff you can only otherwise get through inter-library loan that takes weeks rather than seconds.
Try Library Genesis: https://libgen.is/ https://libgen.is/
- ZunarJ5 4y agoEven better: https://annas-archive.org/ https://annas-archive.org/
- xvector 4y agoThis is the one use case where the blockchain/web3 is useful. Give me a decentralized library on the blockchain, where no government can take it down by merely discovering the host's identity and location. Invulnerable to rubber-hose attacks and censorship (which IPFS is still vulnerable to.)
- pdar4123 4y agoWhy do u need a blockchain? Why not just torrents for sharing.
- MisterSandman 4y agoExactly, torrents are already decentralized.
- xvector 4y agoTorrents cannot be updated. Furthermore, torrents are subject to the sites that advertise them getting banned. You will constantly be on the hunt for new trackers. Blockchain is an obviously superior application here as new books and articles are constantly being released.
- jazzyjackson 4y agoWhy would I need to update my books and pdfs? How difficult is it to follow a publishers RSS feed and download new editions and new uploads? I cannot picture why blockchain seems like a value ad here, there's way easier ways to synchronize collections of data, no global consensus necessary
- xvector 4y agoWhat happens when the RSS feed domain is taken down? What happens when the torrent runs out of seeders? It's not the books and PDFs that are being updated, it's the collection that needs to be updated. A blockchain is far easier to manage and far more censorship resistant.
- opzz 4y agowhy not a blockchain? It's much less likely to go down with network issues because people are financially motivated to run the network.
- chaboud 4y agoI personally don't think it's necessary, but the Blockchain creates an effectively irreversible collectivization of the work: Removal would also undo whatever other work was committed. It's kind of like cryptographically amortized hostage taking... Erase my book, and the pickle ball championships NFT gets it...
- Dylan16807 4y agoIt's super easy to remove a block or a part of a block if you don't care about it. And if you're not accepting payments there's especially little reason for you to need to care.
- alwayslikethis 4y agoIPFS has some theoretical merits, such as not relying on discrete trackers (which is a point of failure), and at present we have a bunch of mirrors that speeds it up. However, BitTorrent has a better track record regarding resilience against interference (from copyright mafia) or other bad actors. IPFS has so far not openly supported this usage.
- account42 4y agoTrackerless torrents via DHT have been a thing for decades.
- xvector 4y agoTorrents can't be updated.
- account42 4y agoThat's not neccesarily a bad thing. Once you release something you shouldn't be able to gaslight people by silently updating it - instead, release a new verson with a new torrent.
- friend_and_foe 4y agoBlockchains don't really do this well though. A blockchain is useful when you need a publicly accessible, canonical shared record of a consensus, obfuscated or otherwise. They're not for storing arbitrary data. If you want to store arbitrary data, and you want peer to peer decentralized kind of features and you want identities obfuscated, currently you're looking at BitTorrent over Tor. I don't know if i2p or Tor or anyone else is working on any sort of swarm like file sharing internally over those networks, but it needs to be done and these shadow libraries need to begin using it.
- xvector 4y agoBlockchains can absolutely be used for storing arbitrary data (see Filecoin.) Torrents cannot be updated. Whether done over Tor or not, they aren't suitable for this use case, especially as you have to chase down the websites that advertise them, as they constantly get banned. What you need is a distributed append-only data structure. Blockchains are an example, but not the only way to do this.
- friend_and_foe 4y agoFilecoin doesn't store data on the blockchain. Filecoin is a blockchain payment network for a monetized IPFS storage network. The two were developed in concert, IPFS was built for filecoin. IPFS is more popular on it's own than with filecoin I'll point out, off topic. But you can use blockchains for arbitrary data, there's nothing preventing you from doing it. It's just a bad idea, everyone has to have every copy of everything anyone might want. Torrents over Tor fall short, Torrents fall short in general I agree. An IPFS type network native to i2p or Tor, internal with no exit, is probably the way to go, unfortunately to my knowledge it does not exist.
- xvector 4y agoThanks for the background on Filecoin. > It's just a bad idea, everyone has to have every copy of everything anyone might want. Do keep in mind that pruned nodes are a thing.
- hackernewds 4y agoResult will be rampant piracy and theft of creator works (which posters seem to be a proponent of here)
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- A4ET8a8uTh0 4y agoThis was going to be my next question with basic assumption that the entire gathered information will either vanish, get moved to torrents or splintered across various believers of the cause.
- alwayslikethis 4y agoI hope they would come up with a way to publish the information for backing up or give it over to libgen.
- wl 4y agoLibGen's selection of these kinds of books is nowhere near that of the Internet Archive. I guess I'm going to have A LOT more interlibrary loans in my future.