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Comment by sktrdie | Hacker News Reader

In my opinion the BitTorrent network, along with the DHT network, holds so much untapped potential. It’s a sea of constantly-changing data.

The data is so much more easily shareable compared to HTTP because all you need is a computer and an network connection. No need for a public IP address.

Where are the Googles or the Yahoos that harvest this data and make it easily accessible? If these companies made fortunes off the data that we put on HTTP sites (along with all the hurdles that populating a site with data comes with) then imagine how much more potential there is in the BitTorrent market where one can for instance very easily share any kind of info (albeit they must be online at first).

Sure now the network is populated by illegal movies and such. But if we populate it with blogs, recipe sites, documentations, videos, etc. a new kind of web can reborn that is more under our control.

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Torrents are static and so are their hashes on the DHT. For blogs, recipe sites and say content creators putting a new video on their site every week, this is not very practical esp. when there are no peers to host their content if their computer is offline. IPFS has a similar problem.

Honestly, I could see this as a pitch for a decent tiktok like service. Your video lives as long as someone somewhere has watched it recently. I might actually enjoy something like that.

Whoa no way I was thinking of something similar, viral-only videos kind of like the Reddit-button https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Button_(Reddit)

It exists: https://joinpeertube.org/

The online peers are virtually servers. If a market is created then peers could get paid to host/seed your site. Instead of buying say a server as we do today for HTTP sites. Also there are mutable torrents.

> For blogs, recipe sites and say content creators putting a new video on their site every week, this is not very practical

IPNS can be used to leverage IPFS for dynamic or updatable content. Lack of peers is still an issue of course, but it does away with the need for a dedicated CDN once your content gets popular enough since users will be seeding it themselves.

That’s where the innovation is needed. You need some form of dedicated hosting, dns, a notification system to alert you when new content is available or automatically download it. The static nature of the content isn’t problem, that’s how media has existed forever and most web media is still only published once and never revised. With a smart enough client though you could receive patches to existing content. The space is more similar to a newsletter but much more capable.

Zeronet can serve frequently updated content in distributed (p2p) network. It works for blogs, forum and social network.

This is so spot on.

It's been some years I've been thinking that given that nowadays it doesn't take much effort to scan all the internet (masscan, etc), it might not be hard to find all trackers and then crawl all the DHT.

I'm not sure if this is feasible, but it might be an interesting start.

I've played around a bit with DHT indexing recently and a very simple python program using libtorrent to send sample_infohashes (BEP51) and download metadata (to get names/files) was enough to get me 1-2 .torrent files per second without any special effort or aggressive settings. The bottleneck (by 10x) has been the embarrassingly parallel info hash to .torrent step, so speeding things up shouldn't be very hard.

After running it sporadically for a few months I ended up with 1.4M torrent names and 30M info hashes, but I never put any work into estimating the size of the DHT, so I don't know what sort of coverage that represents.

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