Show HN: Web3Torrent – Adding Ethereum Micropayments to WebTorrent
blog.statechannels.org
blog.statechannels.org
In my opinion, if torrenting meant one needs to pay for download, we would never have heard about torrents. This might give people more incentive to seed, but I'd never use it for what I use torrents - get stuff for free or reduce the load of FOSS servers.
To me it's the usual crypto thing - very cool from a technological perspective, not useful in real life.
edit: typos
I'm also paying for youtube premium, at the same time the people I'm listening to have to be careful not to say ,,COVID-19'', because their revenue would drop to 0, even though it was the main meme of the last few months. I would happily pay them through lightning network instead.
I don't understand what you meant by this. As in, everyone's tired of hearing about it?
[1] - https://techcrunch.com/2020/03/11/youtube-will-now-allow-cre...
This solves the incentivization of bandwidth in a decentralized way. If we now solve the closely related incentivization of long-term encrypted storage, we would be able to build a sustainable decentralized storage service unlike torrents that are powered by fame or Infura which is powered by corporate philanthropy (which never lasts unless we become the product).
This means that we would be able to replicate backup/archive services like BackBlaze or Amazon Glacier or even ensure the longevity of archive.org.
Everybody's doing it. Not clear if anybody cares.
Indeed, the vast bulk of crypto technologies appear to be solutions out in search of problems.
This means that people who can't afford the content but do have a network connection actually can obtain it and contribute to the network.
There are many services that streaming companies refuse to offer even to paying customers. Now you may say "streaming companies depend on hollywood licensing per country", sure, but this case also happened on Netflix produced shows...
For example, in Canada, the penalty for non-commercial infringement is generally about 100$, and it can go up to 5000$ maximum (repeat offenders and so on). For commercial infringement, the penalty is of 20 000$.
Furthermore, in Canada, seeding downloaded files via P2P service is of ambiguous legality, with some interpretations saying that as long as you don't advertise or try to share it with as much people as possible (positive action) required to make it illegal. Receiving payment for this would torpedo that defense, which means even higher liability. All in all, it's not a good idea.
https://blog.torproject.org/bittorrent-over-tor-isnt-good-id...
This is a nice tech demo but not of any practical significance.
Besides, you can earn currency from just seeding the torrent- presumably there would be a way to download some initial torrents for free and then you can contribute to the network directly without needing to get a wallet or set anything up.
It’s on the web as well, so it could be as seamless as YouTube, only you’d have a small currency counter that goes up if you leave the tab open, and you can either spend that currency by downloading or withdraw it by selling it to other users who would rather pay than seed.
A few years ago transactions were limited to 15 transactions per second, today there are multiple ways to achieve thousands of transactions per second[1]. A few years ago privacy didn't exist and now there are multiple ways to achieve privacy [2][3]. A few years ago end users had to remember long complicated strings to send a transfer or to restore their wallets and now there are easy ways to transfer to human readable names [4] and social wallet recovery [5] if you lose your funds or make a mistake. Argent alone is a huge increase in usability for end users.
There are more but if you even look at these metrics then things are improving at a great clip. Faster than the early web even.
[1] https://medium.com/matter-labs/evaluating-ethereum-l2-scalin... [2] https://tornado.cash/ [3] https://www.aztecprotocol.com/ [4] https://ens.domains/ [5] https://www.argent.xyz/
I'd love something that took the incentive system that makes private torrent networks work, and made it possible to have that incentive system "accessible to the public" without destroying it. Then maybe I could finally get access to the collections that contain those weird old movies I watched once but almost nobody's ever heard of.
Torrents don't run on altruism and they never did. You might be looking at one side of the equation, but what if you could earn cryptocurrency by using extra bandwidth on servers by seeding torrents? What if you could pay for a VPN or private server that has plenty of extra bandwidth? What if you could find something rare much easier or get it much faster?
The problem still exists under "micro-transaction" scheme, but in a less exploitable sense: because each transaction only involves a small amount of money or data, it's probably okay if you encountered with a cheater with one or two transactions. You can just block them after catching them cheating.
But the cheaters can still exploit this problem for their own gain: they just repeat this scheme with all other users on the network, until they received the whoe file without spending anything.
I don't see this protocol preventing such exploitable scenario. In fact it's a very difficult problem to solve efficiently and without a traditional trusted third party. It's even been proved [1] that strong fairness is impossible without a trusted third party. However relying on blockchain as a thrid party, it's possible to achieve this, and there are implementations [2] out there, but the challenge is throughput. Most of these solutions can only handle kilobytes/s of throughput. The computational barrier here is the vast amount of modular exponentiations.
[1] https://www.cs.utexas.edu/~shmat/courses/cs395t_fall04/pagni... [2] https://github.com/sec-bit/zkPoD-node
[1] https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/pipermail/lightning-dev/20...
We considered doing that, but like you also point out, if you had to sign each piece of the torrent, it would slow throughput to a crawl.
Pretty soon some ISP is going to sell a bulk subscription to these streaming services alongside their internet package and we'll have truly come full circle.
The fun thing about this service is that the copyright holders don't get a choice. Their content will be on the platform regardless of what they want so they have an incentive to join the profit sharing in order to better control their metadata on the service and provide better support for their users. Or they can sit and complain and lose out on any of the profits.
The real question is why there isn't a Aereo-like service where users time-share a pool of streaming subscriptions on different streaming services.
Torrents, as a poor choice for the "killer app", aside, state channels are a curious technology but most traditional implementations [fully pre-collateralized channels] have a design flaw where no one wants to put money to the end user, while happily accepting inward capacity from the senders. Haven't looked into this specific implementation, i wonder if it has a fix for this. "Virtual channels" sound relevant here.
If not found on any tracker, such a material is probably too rare for anyone to care about. Even with some monetization model in place, it would be unrealistic to keep all sorts of "rare" materials in the world to make $1 from a random stranger coming once a year.
Anyway, I would't pay $1
Also, there's the issue of people finding rare source materials, but keeping them to themselves, because sharing is a hassle. Monetization would help incentivize these people.
If you only download the popular fresh content like the latest Debian ISO or something like that, of course you never have problems.
Also I don't understand the name "Web3torrent", is it intended to indicate a new version?
How do you know that the user uploading the file actually owns the rights to distribute the file? Wouldn't this just incentivize those with the infrastructure (e.g., money/bandwidth) to take over the market and suddenly get paid for sharing others' content?
The idea of "let's combine a distributed filesharing system with a distributed currency" is completely sound, and one that I've worked on in the past. But this is a totally backwards way of approaching the problem. You have no way of actually paying the content creators, just the content hosts. It's just more of the same, and at least with Spotify I get some neat analytical tools. But this just seems like it's designed to help the people who run topsites, not the people who actually make the content and NEED the money.
Thumbs down until you figure out the problem of rights management through your protocol.
While I appreciate that BitTorrent files are technically used to distribute some "legitimate" things, even in those cases the people you are talking to are part of a swarm: like, the premise is that you are paying someone to have helped you get more of a file you are downloading that everyone has agreed shall cost nothing (whether or not it actually does), not that you are compensating them for the file itself (which would have value above and beyond the bandwidth and cpu costs).
Evaluate them by the software they build, not by how potentially some people will use it.
Within the app context, an unlimited number of channels (up to the budget capacity) can be opened. The video at the top of the blog post is an example of a single user downloading from multiple other leechers & seeders while simultaneously uploading to other leechers.
There's a bit more about it in this post: https://blog.statechannels.org/channels-funding-channels/.
Not directly. State channels are similar to lightning, but there's a key difference:
* in lightning each payment is routed through the network independently, requiring participation from the intermediary nodes
* in a state channel the intermediary nodes are used to establish a channel and then the payments are direct
The upshot is that in state channels, once the connection is established, the payments are truly peer-to-peer, and don't need any interaction with a third party.
We use this property in Web3Torrent, as the payments are sent directly peer-to-peer on top of the webtorrent messaging layer. This wouldn't be possible with lightning, though you could probably find another way to accomplish something similar.
It used to be just like payment channels, but with a bigger scope and more fancy state operations.
The trick with avoiding multiparties was called "virtual state channels" or something like that. When did it change?
Lightning channels are 2 end points, p2p.
Lightning routes are a sequence of lightning channels. Routes are also 2 end points, also p2p. No trusted is required for intermediaries.
Every internet packet, unless it is you to your lan router, passes through many intermediaries. I have no idea how ethereum state channels work, but I assume they route using tcp/ip, and statechannel team understands this as p2p.
So anyway, lightning is p2p.
Cheers.
https://standardcrypto.wordpress.com/2020/04/30/a16z-struggl...
Nice idea anyways, great to see people experimenting in the space!
However, "if you build it they will come". I'm excited to see what will the creative minds of the internet do with this technology once it exists.