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Comment by 10000truths | Hacker News Reader

As long as you have to muck about in your router settings to configure port forwarding or disable reflexive ACLs, peer-to-peer will never catch on with the general populace.

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You might be young and not know, but this is a solved problem. Everyone and their mum ran napster.

Or for a younger audience, a Minecraft server...

To be fair, that was in a time when you could connect to Everyone and their mum's SMB shares over the Internet.

Also, torrents.

UPnP works well enough, if everyone would support it.

I've honestly never seen UPnP actually work before. It's been an option on all my consumer grade routers, but it just doesn't work.

I first know of UPnP because an online game was able to self-configure a port forwarding, so I go to my router and disable it.

It's more the sort of technology that you only notice when it doesn't work, otherwise it is subtle magic that you don't see. A lot of software relies on it in one way or another and works better with it, but of course it's tough to know when something is UPnP powered or using some fallback alternative.

And what if we incentivize distributing (legal) P2P files/patches by paying the ones who share via a crypto token?

There is a BitTorrent coin, it’s an interesting idea.

https://www.bittorrent.com/token/btt/

That would work.

Big bandwidth users (0 day patch for games) might like buying less hardware and paying some users who have good bandwidth to distribute the patch.

With IPv6 it is pretty much doable almost with no config. With IPv4 you need to work a bit.

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