7 ms·

Bit451 – Decentralized, distributed anonymous P2P media network

71 points by danboarder 12y ago

zkhalique 12y ago
Interesting. How does it work?
- Confiks 12y ago
  It doesn't. This is just someone's dream. The writeup that is linked to is only a summary of which technologies should be tied together, without any proper explanation on how that should be done. The GitHub repository is from July, contains only a few weird UML diagrams, and doesn't have updates thereafter. If you like the genre of fantasy, it's a fun writeup though. Especially the 'contribute' part.
  - duggan 12y ago
    > Now let us go and ignite a firestorm, planting the technological seedlings of the future over a trail of obsolete overgrowth! <Insert megalomaniacal moustache twirling here>
  - zkhalique 12y ago
    Haha. Well, we built a decentralized social network, and bitcoin is a decentralized money, so we'll see, maybe someone can make decentralized media server. I mean, isn't GNU Goblin something like that already? And the web is decentralized ... so with a decentralized social network powering user accounts and social stuff, what's the problem? You can even use bitcoins and contracts to set up hosting agreements between people.
cjg 12y ago
"It should be completed by the end of the year" seems unlikely.
undefined0 12y ago
I too dream of such a thing. Personally, I want the idea where you pay bitcoins to the entire network, the payment gets split by the percentage of storage. Webmasters would pay the network (and have an API to generate download links, upload authorization for users to upload directly to the network), giving users the ability to use it for free or can pay directly to the network too, or even get a premium account on the website for convinence. I don't care about the other ideas bit451 has suggested (playlists, hashtags, etc), I think the network should be for resilient file storage and for videos people can build an application on top of that network. I'd love to switch to a network rather than rely on a single datacenter which can be raided over night. A 'Usenet for HTTP'.
- sanxiyn 12y ago
  Please help https://tahoe-lafs.org/ https://tahoe-lafs.org/ then.
  - undefined0 12y ago
    I've heard of Tahoe-LAFS before, I am under the impression it's for when I own the storage server rather than using a network of other peoples server? My dream is of a network of other people operating the servers for both liability reasons and it would be cheaper because given a network of people paying with bitcoin, it would be oversold, reducing the price more than getting a dedicated server (assuming there is competition). If I'm wrong, and other people provide storage with Tahoe-LAFS, how are you recieving money for it? Storage is expensive when done on enterprise scale, we can't rely on peoples open internet idiology for something as expensive as that.
    - evgen 12y ago
      The original technology Tahoe-LAFS is based upon (MojoNation) also spawned BitTorrent. For BT Bram removed the secure tunnels (a la Tor) and the distributed payment system. Over the past decade we have just slowly added it all back and at each step proclaimed ourselves to be rather clever...
sp4ke 12y ago
Oh dear I wish this project becomes a reality
caractacus 12y ago
Seems to be dead already. No code commits since early August, /r/bit451 has tumbleweeds...
chuckup 12y ago
I would love to see something simpler, think Kad DHT meets Bitcoin. I could share a hash with you, and from the command line you could simply type "fetch L9ThxnotKPzthJ7hu3bnORuT6xI" just as you'd use wget. This would be a hash of an index file that describes the data, broken into small chunks. Now your client goes back onto the network and finds the cheapest way to retrieve all these chunks. You could set a default, "5 cents per GB" that you're willing to pay. Servers could monitor the network and see what's being requested often, and pay to download (and re-serve) these chunks themselves in the hopes of profiting. When files become rare, servers could charge a premium. Bitcoin is not a micropayment system, so paying per chunk would be expensive. You could pre-pay, say 1GB at a time at first, and slowly build up a trusted reputation where you only pay afterwards (by reusing a bitcoin address as your "identity" that you always send from). You'd work out a "contract" (signed with your sending address), give it to the server, and if you skip out on paying they could use it as proof of nonpayment which they would share with other servers. (Maybe all servers have a blacklist file they share for free). They could try to send you bogus data, but since you can verify by-the-chunk you wouldn't request more chunks from them once you've received a piece that fails a hash. Once you've got this network in place, you could build any of the things the author in this link is describing. My hope, a Usenet 2.0 style protocol. The whole thing is very exciting. But first you need a simple, generic, data-for-bitcoin network. Everything I've seen so far in the bitcoin/storage area (maidsafe, storj) sounds overly complicated and downright scammy. I don't want to back up my data to a p2p network. I don't want to have to purchase a new altcoin to use your network. I just want to, for starters, type "serve [file]" or "fetch [hash]" on the CLI and have it all magically work behind the scenes. First place I'd see this taking off is sharing porn - yay! From there, after time, it could become the backbone of "web 3.0".
- jsprogrammer 12y ago
  Why not just build an automated post pay system instead of relying on the other person to remember? At that point, why not setup escrow processes where the sender has to provide proof to release the payment? This could probably go on and on, as I'm not sure there is a complete answer to centralized vs. decentralized. You likely just have to pick based on what attributes are most important at the time.
rb2k_ 12y ago
The fact that they designed the whole system "up front" without a working prototype but decided to include UML diagrams makes me cringe a bit. I have yet to see a system where up-front UML design really works. Then again, when I was at university, I've seen a few professors teach that as a way of doing "quality software development". On a side note: Interesting to see OrientDB. I've always had a place in my heart for that project.
- sz4kerto 12y ago
  Whether or not UML works depends mostly on the people who use it. Not on whether they are smart or not -- it fits with some mindsets and clashes with some others. I have seen very-very good C++ programmers who worked with roundtrip engineering tools (Together) and diagram was always the first. (And the project went well.)
- swalsh 12y ago
  I have created several very successful projects by doing very in depth UML up front. Of course you'll make some changes once some of the finer details start to reveal themselves, but if you thought through the separations well enough, it should be relatively minor.
hendzen 12y ago
Another ambitious p2p project with no code written. Yawn.

71 points by danboarder 12y ago

zkhalique 12y ago

Interesting. How does it work?

Confiks 12y ago
It doesn't. This is just someone's dream. The writeup that is linked to is only a summary of which technologies should be tied together, without any proper explanation on how that should be done. The GitHub repository is from July, contains only a few weird UML diagrams, and doesn't have updates thereafter. If you like the genre of fantasy, it's a fun writeup though. Especially the 'contribute' part.
- duggan 12y ago
  > Now let us go and ignite a firestorm, planting the technological seedlings of the future over a trail of obsolete overgrowth! <Insert megalomaniacal moustache twirling here>
- zkhalique 12y ago
  Haha. Well, we built a decentralized social network, and bitcoin is a decentralized money, so we'll see, maybe someone can make decentralized media server. I mean, isn't GNU Goblin something like that already? And the web is decentralized ... so with a decentralized social network powering user accounts and social stuff, what's the problem? You can even use bitcoins and contracts to set up hosting agreements between people.

cjg 12y ago

"It should be completed by the end of the year" seems unlikely.

undefined0 12y ago

I too dream of such a thing. Personally, I want the idea where you pay bitcoins to the entire network, the payment gets split by the percentage of storage. Webmasters would pay the network (and have an API to generate download links, upload authorization for users to upload directly to the network), giving users the ability to use it for free or can pay directly to the network too, or even get a premium account on the website for convinence. I don't care about the other ideas bit451 has suggested (playlists, hashtags, etc), I think the network should be for resilient file storage and for videos people can build an application on top of that network. I'd love to switch to a network rather than rely on a single datacenter which can be raided over night. A 'Usenet for HTTP'.

sanxiyn 12y ago
Please help https://tahoe-lafs.org/ https://tahoe-lafs.org/ then.
- undefined0 12y ago
  I've heard of Tahoe-LAFS before, I am under the impression it's for when I own the storage server rather than using a network of other peoples server? My dream is of a network of other people operating the servers for both liability reasons and it would be cheaper because given a network of people paying with bitcoin, it would be oversold, reducing the price more than getting a dedicated server (assuming there is competition). If I'm wrong, and other people provide storage with Tahoe-LAFS, how are you recieving money for it? Storage is expensive when done on enterprise scale, we can't rely on peoples open internet idiology for something as expensive as that.
  - evgen 12y ago
    The original technology Tahoe-LAFS is based upon (MojoNation) also spawned BitTorrent. For BT Bram removed the secure tunnels (a la Tor) and the distributed payment system. Over the past decade we have just slowly added it all back and at each step proclaimed ourselves to be rather clever...

sp4ke 12y ago

Oh dear I wish this project becomes a reality

caractacus 12y ago

Seems to be dead already. No code commits since early August, /r/bit451 has tumbleweeds...

chuckup 12y ago

I would love to see something simpler, think Kad DHT meets Bitcoin. I could share a hash with you, and from the command line you could simply type "fetch L9ThxnotKPzthJ7hu3bnORuT6xI" just as you'd use wget. This would be a hash of an index file that describes the data, broken into small chunks. Now your client goes back onto the network and finds the cheapest way to retrieve all these chunks. You could set a default, "5 cents per GB" that you're willing to pay. Servers could monitor the network and see what's being requested often, and pay to download (and re-serve) these chunks themselves in the hopes of profiting. When files become rare, servers could charge a premium. Bitcoin is not a micropayment system, so paying per chunk would be expensive. You could pre-pay, say 1GB at a time at first, and slowly build up a trusted reputation where you only pay afterwards (by reusing a bitcoin address as your "identity" that you always send from). You'd work out a "contract" (signed with your sending address), give it to the server, and if you skip out on paying they could use it as proof of nonpayment which they would share with other servers. (Maybe all servers have a blacklist file they share for free). They could try to send you bogus data, but since you can verify by-the-chunk you wouldn't request more chunks from them once you've received a piece that fails a hash. Once you've got this network in place, you could build any of the things the author in this link is describing. My hope, a Usenet 2.0 style protocol. The whole thing is very exciting. But first you need a simple, generic, data-for-bitcoin network. Everything I've seen so far in the bitcoin/storage area (maidsafe, storj) sounds overly complicated and downright scammy. I don't want to back up my data to a p2p network. I don't want to have to purchase a new altcoin to use your network. I just want to, for starters, type "serve [file]" or "fetch [hash]" on the CLI and have it all magically work behind the scenes. First place I'd see this taking off is sharing porn - yay! From there, after time, it could become the backbone of "web 3.0".

jsprogrammer 12y ago
Why not just build an automated post pay system instead of relying on the other person to remember? At that point, why not setup escrow processes where the sender has to provide proof to release the payment? This could probably go on and on, as I'm not sure there is a complete answer to centralized vs. decentralized. You likely just have to pick based on what attributes are most important at the time.

rb2k_ 12y ago

The fact that they designed the whole system "up front" without a working prototype but decided to include UML diagrams makes me cringe a bit. I have yet to see a system where up-front UML design really works. Then again, when I was at university, I've seen a few professors teach that as a way of doing "quality software development". On a side note: Interesting to see OrientDB. I've always had a place in my heart for that project.

sz4kerto 12y ago
Whether or not UML works depends mostly on the people who use it. Not on whether they are smart or not -- it fits with some mindsets and clashes with some others. I have seen very-very good C++ programmers who worked with roundtrip engineering tools (Together) and diagram was always the first. (And the project went well.)
swalsh 12y ago
I have created several very successful projects by doing very in depth UML up front. Of course you'll make some changes once some of the finer details start to reveal themselves, but if you thought through the separations well enough, it should be relatively minor.

hendzen 12y ago

Another ambitious p2p project with no code written. Yawn.