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Comment by crankylinuxuser | Hacker News Reader

Network topological discovery is the hard pill to swallow with p2p based tech. You're paying for it in much higher network bandwidth, cpu, battery, and more.

Eventually the tradeoffs will be so minuscule that they will be a rounding error. But right now, that's not true.

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Pirate Bay is all magnet links now. Internet Archive serves most items as torrents while acting as a store of last resort. SciHub and LibGen are functional and available.

There are tradeoffs, but it will happen, even if it's TXT records for a domain that point to IPFS links (namecoin aside). The future will make it easier, but it works today.

Pirate Bay, SciHub and Libgen are used mainly on desktop computers with an unlimited broadband connection. They are niche communities for enthusiasts (whether the dwindling pool of torrent users, or academics/bookish people). The general public now consumes its content on mobile, and as the GP mentioned there are significant bandwidth and battery costs to trying to provide distributed content over the mobile devices we have today.

The harder pill is IPv4 and NAT. It used to be easier to grab a static IP from your ISP, but those days are gone for many of us.

IPv6 could really foster a home network revolution, when it's finally in place 20 years from now.

I don't buy that NAT is a huge roadblock. A VPS is $5/mo, or dynamic DNS plus port forwarding is free. Either way, an ISP can apply the same reasoning and cut off access. Centralization due to using DNS (or raw IPs) for naming is the problem. Censorship resistance comes from there being a swarm that as a whole cannot be taken down, while members come and go. This requires a decentralized namespace for referencing content.

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