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Comment by niea_11 | Hacker News Reader

You can still download the zip file of the repository through archive.org.

And there is no direct link (took a quick look) to copyrighted content in the source code. If they shutdown the main site, without a data backup, the code is useless. Users will have to re-upload and re-seed the torrents they have.

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Tangentially, I'm interested in the concept of the torrent data moving into something somewhat indestructible by also highly available, such as the bitcoin blockchain. Your torrent site then "mounts" the blockchain, scanning the chain for the torrent data (magnet URIs) necessary to bootstrap a corpus.

I think what you're suggesting is already possible (in a different way) not by using the blockhain, but by crawling bittorrent's DHT.

Either of the solutions, will let seeders and leechers communicate in a decentralized way, but if there is no one with the original files, it won't work.

So, in this case, nyaa facilitates the seeder/leecher communication, but if the main site is shutdown and users who have the files are not willing to seed the torrents again then the source code is useless.

Crawling bittorrent's DHT is mentioned in this paper [1]:

This paper presents two kinds of attacks based on crawl-ing the DHTs used for distributed BitTorrent tracking. First, we show how pirates can use crawling to rebuild BitTorrent search engines just a few hours after they are shut down (crawling for fun). Second, we show how content owners can use related techniques to monitor pi-rates’ behavior in preparation for legal attacks and negate any perceived anonymity of the decentralized BitTorrent architecture (crawling for profit)

[1]: https://www.usenix.org/legacy/event/woot10/tech/full_papers/...

As an avid hater of Bitcoin and lover of copyright infringement, I am all for that! It would be great if we could get the MPA and RIAA to kill Bitcoin for us. People would still gamble away their life's savings on other scams, like Amway, slot machines, or Tesla stock, but at least they wouldn't waste gigawatts of electrical power doing it.

1) Bitcoin can be powered by renewable sources of electricity such as solar and it is very cost effective to do so.

2) Bitcoin uses about as much power as New Zealand.

3) The amount of bitcoin mining is 6.25 bitcoins every 10 minutes which halves every few years. The more mining, the less the miners make. If bitcoin had 1/100th as many miners, it would use 1/100th as much energy but still function and work the same. However, it would be 100x more profitable to be a miner and less secure.

4)As the mining rewards halve, we can expect the people willing to mine to halve and the electrical usage to halve.

5) Ethereum is moving away from proof of work to proof of stake in it’s transition to Ethereum 2.0. This will make eth use orders of magnitude less power to the point where as long as you hold 32 Ethereum you could be processing Ethereum transactions from just your mobile phone.

6) Many altcoins are more energy efficient or use their hash power for something useful. Remember Primecoin?

What you are describing is sorta already a thing, take a look at sia[0], which is a coin? used to purchase long-term data storage. You can't really scan the chain as far as I understand it but why not host the entire index on sia as well?

[0]: https://sia.tech

I would store the data on the bitcoin chain because there is an enormous amount of value (hundreds of billions of dollars) that hinges on the continued existence of that chain.

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