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Comment by shortoncash | Hacker News Reader

I feel like things will change in the next few years. One of these decentralized video or storage services might take off and change things forever. Perhaps it's wishful thinking, but ever since blockchain technology got rapid adoption (at least among technical people), I can't help but think we're a few user interface innovations on top of decentralized technology away from really seeing a completely different kind of internet.

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Forgive my ignorance (I haven't found a resource that clearly discusses blockchain without conflating it with cryptocurrencies) - but can we even have a blockchain-based tech that doesn't burn enormous amounts of electricity just to operate? If not, then I don't see how blockchain can do anything but make things worse.

Also, the real problem isn't technical here. P2P file sharing technologies - from BitTorrent to IPFS - work well and efficiently. The problem, which makes the Internet media evolve towards big players owning CDNs and not towards IPFS-like network, is legal liability. When I watch a video of a wrong colour on YouTube, I'm protected by Safe Harbour. If I watch the same movie over BitTorrent, I risk having my life ruined by copyright laws. As long as this can happen, we won't have fully decentralized media.

> but can we even have a blockchain-based tech that doesn't burn enormous amounts of electricity just to operate?

Look into Proof of Stake (PoS) - people are looking into more efficient blockchains (although there's some controversy over whether it will work)

I've heard of the term, but from what I understand, no actual working implementation of that concept currently exists, right?

Decred is currently mined using a mix of PoW and PoS.

Current supply[1]:

PoW-mined: 43.5% PoS-mined: 21.8% Development Subsidy: 7.3% Airdrop: 13.7% Dev Premine: 13.7%

Blackcoin is also PoS mined, and NXT reaches consensus using PoS but if IIUC is not mined per se.

1: https://www.decred.org/

DTube is attempting to do just that:

https://dtube.video/

https://steemit.com/video/@heimindanger/introducing-dtube-a-...

That sounds a lot like classic filesharing. But better filesharing isn't really a technical issue, we know how to do all that. It's a niche product because it has none of the legal protections that YouTube has (safe harbour etc). Distributing files without written permission from the owner isn't legally possible for individuals

It's already there. IPFS. Just need a way to index it. There's Ethereum. Tezos could potentially do it cheaper.

And a way to ensure you don't get sued out of your livelihood for the copyrighted file IPFS happened to cache on your machine.

I wonder if you could take a middle step, and host a community-run server for youtube-dl itself; run YouTube-mp3 on an anonymous and decentralized server. Perhaps Ethereum is the right technology for this.

Would something like that be possible with Ethereum or otherwise blockchains in general?

I don't understand blockchain technology in depth, but my understanding is that writing to the blockchain is usually not particularly cheap or fast, especially when writing large amounts of data. A blockchain that fills up with terabytes of pirated movies or mp3s would become difficult to operate, wouldn't it?

You'd be using some sort of filecoin-like storage system, where you pay people for distributed storage.

If I've been following the whole Ethereum thing correctly, as an outsider who kind of looks down on it, this is right up it's alley. You write some sort of smart contract which allows for the uploading and downloading of music blobs, charges for the service, and if insufficient coins are garnered for storage deletes the least used files.

I don't think you need a server or any such thing, and the only way to force a take down would be to take down the underlying services.

> I don't think you need a server or any such thing, and the only way to force a take down would be to take down the underlying services.

What's to stop the MPAA/RIAA and ISPs from just suing everyone on the network who's hosting part of the file? If they can sue bittorrent users, what's the significant legal difference here?

There's probably nothing to stop them, but it's way more hilarious. Anonymous internet people start using the networks for various flavors of illegal file storage, and various innocent network operators just trying to sell shovels in a gold rush or run a simple pyramid scam start getting sued by the RIAA or prosecuted by the FBI, while the original uploaders (or even the smart contracts to maintain and index the uploads) are dust in the wind.

I don't think I'd call random innocent people getting served with lawsuits "hilarious".

It's hilarious because people have been jumping into running services without necessarily considering the legal liabilities they've been signing up for.

It's like if someone started a point-to-point delivery business where they take anonymous, secure packages between different places, no questions asked, and then are surprised when the police show up and say they're pretty sure that a good portion of the packages they've been carrying are drugs and pipe bombs, and ask them to roll on their clients, or at least stop delivering packages. And then the delivery man tries to make a philosophical argument that they aren't morally or legally responsible for the contents of their packages, and in any case it really shouldn't be illegal to distribute drugs or pipe bombs.

Why not just use spotify? If you are building a commercial service a blockchain just complicates matters and gives no benefit.

If you are building a piracy service a blockchain just complicates things and adds no value.

A pretty good rule of thumb is that if you can replace block chain with a database or anything else and lose no functionality, not to mention remove the whole thing together and simplify your solution it's not block chain but bullshit.

> Why not just use spotify?

Spotify doesn't have the music I want to listen to.

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