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Comment by Igelau | Hacker News Reader

> torrent

This is the kind of thing where getting a scuzzy blockchain involved would be ludicrous step backwards. Torrent isn't new tech but everyone seems to have forgotten it exists.

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Your IP address is revealed when you use a torrent, which opens you up to criminal prosecution. Running Bittorrent over Tor is also slow, and tends to overwhelm the volunteer run network. And someone also has to pay for the bandwidth, hardware, and sysadmin time to scan, upload, host.

Incentivized onion routing networks like the Oxen network or Nym offer the potential for fast, anonymous filesharing, while decentralized storage networks like Sia or Filecoin could act as censorship resistant repositories.

The problem with torrents is that they are clumsy, particularly for small files like PDFs. EMule had a better overall User Experience with the Kademilla network than Bittorrent. We need a new generation of P2P applications and protocols that a) Are easy to use for the purpose of searching for single files with specific metadata (author name, keywords, text/abstract content,e tc). and b) There is an "incentive" to share content in addition to pure altruism. As with Bittorrent, Kademilla or other P2P we have seen that content availability decays.

because it "just works"

Haven't the movie studios seeded their own torrents and then taken the people on the other end of the connection to court? I'm sure a lot of the DMCA letters etc directed at ISPs were specifically for torrent users.

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