Web2Web: Serverless Websites Powered by Torrents and Bitcoin | Hacker News Reader

Web2Web: Serverless Websites Powered by Torrents and Bitcoin

torrentfreak.com

102 pointsfraqed26 comments

When I looked into it, webtorrent still requires a centralized server to at the very least set up the peer to peer connection. The problem is that there isnt a way to avoid this with WebRTC. It also serves content to the initial peer.

How is this serverless? Am I missing something?

I am with you.

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/Guide/API/WebRT...

While the infohash is stored in the blockchain, the other immediate issues is that to get the infohash, you still need to connect to a centralized third-party such as blockexplorer.com. Browsers don't natively support TCP, which is how normal torrent and blockchain clients connect to each other. WebRTC is a workaround for torrents, but there doesn't seem to be a workaround for blockchains If we want true serverless architecture within browsers, we, at least, need browsers that support TCP connections.

What features of TCP would allow serverless connections ? AFAIK, even BitTorrent (DHT) and others connect to a centralized "super-node" which then gives them other nodes to connect to.

Sorry, that was hastily written and poorly worded -- more accurately, we would AT LEAST, need browsers that support TCP connections in order to connect to the p2p networks that we already have. In practice we would need a lot more, as even apps like BitTorrent and blockchains still rely on our centralized internet infrastructure to some degree.

You mention the BitTorrent DHT, but I don't believe that it's necessary to connect to a centralized super-node. You do, however; need the address of at least one other peer to start. Unfortunately, the only way to assign an address is through our ISP system which is centralized. For true peer-to-peer architecture, normal people would have to connect the internet at the same level that ISPs such as Comcast and AT&T connect to each other... think some sort of large scale mesh network.

WebRTC has no built in peer discovery to bootstrap the startup. At minimum a signaling server is will be needed for exchanging descriptions. You may also need to exchange ICE candidate information. So while this isn't serverless, it could be really great for reducing bandwidth costs until you consider that this design does not play well with mobile devices which have usage caps.

Two things:

First, how much BTC needs to be deposited per update?

Second, this doesn't provide a solution for anonymization, does it?

This is a really fascinating concept - in reality there's no reason this needs to be anchored to bitcoin, only a blockchain for hash verification. Maybe another blockchain can be used that wouldn't charge transaction fees for updating or registering? Also, this feels a little similar in ideology to ethereum swarm (http://swarm-gateways.net/bzz:/swarm/).

WebRTC does not need a centralised server. It can benefit from servers that can lead together NAT or firewall victims but these don't have to be centralised.

Does it share the same weakness at zeroNet - maximum allowed size of a webpage (100MB)?

Why in the heck would you want a webpage to be 100mb+ ?!

I wouldn't say that is a weakness, you want your webpages to be as small as possible.

There's an up arrow next to usernames.

> Why in the heck would you want a webpage to be 100mb+ ?!

Websites have scripts, images, videos, ads, text. Image + thumbnail = 1MB, gallery of images = 15MB, 600 posts with images, thumbnails, comments with avatars = ... ?

My wordpress blog started in 2010 with images, thumbnails is 5GB, last time I checked in July.

But 100MB per page is ridiculous, expect for embedded videos. I'd be waiting two minutes for each page to load.

In the top comment by webpage I meant a blog. I wanted to publish my blog on zeroNet, but I can do it only when I remove all images, which misses the point of my blog.

Also keep in mind that this isn't a traditional Request/Response model. Much (if not all) of a "website" must be downloaded up front via the torrent network, and then run locally. 100MB per request on a traditional site is ridiculous but 100MB for downloading 1 very large web app from the torrent network is not so crazy.

>600 posts with images, thumbnails, comments with avatars =

This is not all on ONE page

>My wordpress blog started in 2010 with images, thumbnails is 5GB, last time I checked in July.

Again, that is the size of your database, not webpage.

Go look in the code and quit asking second thought questions that chew up other's resources.

There's really no need to respond so snappily to simple questions like that. Even if it were unacceptable to ask a question that could be answered by reading the source code (and I think most would say that's fine) it still wouldn't be ok to be so rude.

Observationally, I'm 100% accurate in my statements. Someone asking a question like this has little intent to know the actual answer and raises doubt in those who do not have intent to know the answer. It's a recursive pattern that is wasteful. My karma burning is of little significance compared to unbounded criticism that comes in by way of ignorance.

It is wasteful to ask leading questions, and it pollutes the discussion here. HN reacts negatively to "reddit" like comments, so I see little reason why we can't start reacting negatively to people who ask leading questions that are actually veiled blaming statements. It increases the trust of the comments and decreases the extra workloads having to parse people's illogical comments.

No, WebTorrent easily handles 500MB+ torrents. (I'm a WebTorrent collaborator)

There's no limit on zer0net, if you pull the hovering 0 in the top right corner to the left with your mouse there is a menu where you can set the limit to whatever you want - or if any website wants to use more a dialogue pop up will ask you if you want to reset.

This post killed BTorrent's tracker. It's back up now.

How much redundancy is there to protect against DDoS?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com