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Blockchain Bay

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There is no point to this. Torrents are already cryptographically-verified and stored in distributed databases.

The blockchain storage adds nothing, increases costs, and creates unnecessary public logs.

Torrents are reasonably secure but finding them has been a harder longer problem.

Trackers & search engines come and go. For example Demonoid/Demonoii[1], recently coming back.

Not a fan of blockchain in general but this seems like a valid use.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32083567 https://torrentfreak.com/iconic-demonii-bittorrent-tracker-m... (6d ago)

Decentralized hosting doesn't require a blockchain.

What would you suggest using instead? How will it's availability compare? Will someone in 100 years have a chance of finding it?

There are things like IPFS that demonstrate the durable, decentralized hosting is possible.

It doesn't seem like torrent sites need to fully decentralize. Yes, the bigger ones sometimes get taken down, but the overall community is doing fine, especially members'-only sites.

> Will someone in 100 years have a chance of finding it?

There's no reason a blockchain stands a better chance of surviving 100 years than any other distributed, decentralized, cryptographically-verified database.

Again, not a blockchain fan. But I think it's naive to ignore the upside. I highly doubt we're doing to lose the bittorrent blockchain, even if the tech goes defunct & inactive. This is the use case the crypto-currency ponzi scheme detracted from, is the forgotten value proposition.

I dont see real incentives for people to replicate things like IPFS. Deep time storage seems socially as unaddressed now as when IPFS was new & shiny in 2015.

There's a technical possibility but in actual use there's awful decentralization: incredibly spotty replication done via very narrow curatorship or some short/medium term caching. The tech making it technically possible is insufficient for the social condition of making people want to back your bytes up. TBH IPFS- in practice- seems about like a secure/encrypted higher tech sneakernet.

The actual possibility of enduring seems flagrantly absent from any alternative I & seemingly you can think of.

IPFS is basically similar to BitTorrent, it does not solve the problem of "who will host this data" that PirateBay and similar sites struggle with.

> There's no reason a blockchain stands a better chance of surviving 100 years than any other distributed, decentralized, cryptographically-verified database.

BitTorrent and IPFS are not distributed databases, they are mechanisms for peer-to-peer transfer. It is very likely the blockchains will stand better chance at long-term survival than centralized databases because:

1. There is economic incentive to keep the network alive, as long as the token price remains above a small value. Ethereum could drop back down to $1 and block producers would still be incentivized to continue securing the network.

2. These networks are censorship-resistant. The data posted on-chain is replicated across all nodes, it cannot be blocked or taken down like you would see with the Pirate Bay database or even Tor which is only secured by 10 directory nodes and is regularly attacked.

3. These networks are permissionless - any user in the world can download a full node that helps secure the network. This makes it possible for anybody to search the on-chain data without the need to go through a permissioned search engine such as Google, and without needing to find a permissioned website such as ThePirateBay clones which are regularly taken down by hosting services.

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