Hacker News Reader

Comment by idoby | Hacker News Reader

I imagine a future where a project like wikipedia is replicated endlessly by willing users on an IPFS-like network, where people can donate CPU, storage and bandwidth instead of money to pay for a centralized server, simply by running something like ipfs pin wikipedia (or a subset)

View on HN

Sounds kind of like a newsgroup, with every client also being a server. I think torrents can be dynamically updated now.[1][2] Maybe we already have the tools we need, we just haven’t put all the pieces together yet.

[1] https://www.bittorrent.org/beps/bep_0039.html

[2] https://www.bittorrent.org/beps/bep_0046.html

That's right. We need to start thinking decentralized. Instead of using DNS to find a server and HTTP to get the content from it, we should switch to a decentralized lookup of the data itself, sourced from wherever the network can serve it. I don't mind getting one wiki page from Peter and another from Paul.

I think IPFS and Filecoin could solve these problems and keep attribution and data integrity intact. Would be nice to have the privacy of monero or another more private coin to facilitate subscription functionality with built in micropayments.

Update on this front:

Web3Torrent adds etherium micropayments to WebTorrent

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23602008

https://blog.statechannels.org/introducing-web3torrent/

nice. pointing 2 torrents at the same folder alteady works. If they share files at worse it will be overwritten with the same content. Even if there is a lack of clients supporting it you can still force a re-check and avoid downloading everything again.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com