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Comment by jlebrech | Hacker News Reader

I always wondered why you couldn't just download a torrent of torrents for the month.

Well, there's a draft to specify semantics of a torrent-of-torrents and incremental updates http://bittorrent.org/beps/bep_0049.html

But that'll need revising once sha1 torrents are deprecated.

It would be interesting to create a distributed catalog of torrents itself.

Maybe I'm not picking up what you're putting down, but how does this differ from DHT?

It might be possible with the DHT alone, but I think for what the grandparent poster wants it would depend on the ability to query the DHT. Both in general and by popularity and insert date.

That might be possible, but with the prvelence of magnet links instead of everyone using that, I just assumed not.

It's possible to do something fully distributed, but not just with the existing DHT network: https://www.tribler.org/

if you substitute torrents with ipfs this is trivial:

    # create empty folder
    FOLDER=`ipfs object new unixfs-dir`
    # add folders to object
    FOLDER=`ipfs object patch "$FOLDER" add-link 2017-01 "$HASH_2017_01"`
    FOLDER=`ipfs object patch "$FOLDER" add-link 2017-02 "$HASH_2017_02"`
    FOLDER=`ipfs object patch "$FOLDER" add-link 2017-03 "$HASH_2017_03"`
    # print final hash
    echo $FOLDER

This would result in a hash that has the folders for January, February and March, which can have arbitrary nested folders and files in them.

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