Give me a decentralized library on the blockchain, where no government can take it down by merely discovering the host's identity and location. Invulnerable to rubber-hose attacks and censorship (which IPFS is still vulnerable to.)
Torrents cannot be updated. Whether done over Tor or not, they aren't suitable for this use case, especially as you have to chase down the websites that advertise them, as they constantly get banned.
What you need is a distributed append-only data structure. Blockchains are an example, but not the only way to do this.
IPFS is more popular on it's own than with filecoin I'll point out, off topic.
But you can use blockchains for arbitrary data, there's nothing preventing you from doing it. It's just a bad idea, everyone has to have every copy of everything anyone might want.
Torrents over Tor fall short, Torrents fall short in general I agree. An IPFS type network native to i2p or Tor, internal with no exit, is probably the way to go, unfortunately to my knowledge it does not exist.
> It's just a bad idea, everyone has to have every copy of everything anyone might want.
Do keep in mind that pruned nodes are a thing.
Blockchain is an obviously superior application here as new books and articles are constantly being released.
I cannot picture why blockchain seems like a value ad here, there's way easier ways to synchronize collections of data, no global consensus necessary
It's not the books and PDFs that are being updated, it's the collection that needs to be updated.
A blockchain is far easier to manage and far more censorship resistant.
It's kind of like cryptographically amortized hostage taking... Erase my book, and the pickle ball championships NFT gets it...
And if you're not accepting payments there's especially little reason for you to need to care.