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Comment by pdar4123 | Hacker News Reader

Why do u need a blockchain? Why not just torrents for sharing.

IPFS has some theoretical merits, such as not relying on discrete trackers (which is a point of failure), and at present we have a bunch of mirrors that speeds it up. However, BitTorrent has a better track record regarding resilience against interference (from copyright mafia) or other bad actors. IPFS has so far not openly supported this usage.

Trackerless torrents via DHT have been a thing for decades.

I personally don't think it's necessary, but the Blockchain creates an effectively irreversible collectivization of the work: Removal would also undo whatever other work was committed.

It's kind of like cryptographically amortized hostage taking... Erase my book, and the pickle ball championships NFT gets it...

It's super easy to remove a block or a part of a block if you don't care about it.

And if you're not accepting payments there's especially little reason for you to need to care.

Exactly, torrents are already decentralized.

Torrents cannot be updated. Furthermore, torrents are subject to the sites that advertise them getting banned. You will constantly be on the hunt for new trackers.

Blockchain is an obviously superior application here as new books and articles are constantly being released.

Why would I need to update my books and pdfs? How difficult is it to follow a publishers RSS feed and download new editions and new uploads?

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

What happens when the RSS feed domain is taken down? What happens when the torrent runs out of seeders?

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.

Torrents can't be updated.

That's not neccesarily a bad thing. Once you release something you shouldn't be able to gaslight people by silently updating it - instead, release a new verson with a new torrent.

why not a blockchain? It's much less likely to go down with network issues because people are financially motivated to run the network.

They don't seem motivated to do so now, while torrents, Russian hostings and warez seem up for years. How come?

I don't see any major blockchains going down right now?

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