I was curious how this works and then I saw the sqlite requests in the network tab. It's amazing to see what we have access to these days -- SQLite over HTTP over IPFS to provide a giant, censorship-resistant database!
The HTTP part is also not censorship-resistant. ipfs.io has a DMCA process, and they could also be asked to reveal the IP of users.
In practice it's very rare for me to see a direct ipfs protocol link, almost all the traffic goes through HTTP gateways (which frequently cache the content as well). Hard to imagine that they don't become a target for "hosting" pirated content if / when IPFS becomes more than a negligible platform for piracy. (A significant amount of Library Genesis traffic is already using IPFS via these same gateways.)
As you mention, there's a DMCA process for some of the gateways, but that might not be enough to ward off attention.
Disclaimer: I wrote that article and was somewhat involved in the other sqlite over ipfs project this is forked from.
Yes, for MB size files just downloading the whole thing will be faster and much easier - even if running in the browser. I'd say the boundary is somewhere around 10MB compressed (~20-200MB uncompressed). Looks like the sqlite dump used here is ~400MB in size, ~180MB compressed. Loading that in the browser would probably work but it wouldn't be too great.
As I understand it, the purpose of using SQLite is indexing and querying, ie. being able to efficiently search through the data via a website.
Is there any incentive for nodes to do so?
Is it possible to see a statistic about how many nodes mirror it?
What do you mean with "torrents work fine"? Do you have any statistics on the lifetime of torrents?
Everything ever written to the Bitcoin blockchain is still available and massively distributed. It seems very unlikely anything will ever get lost during our lifetime. So I would say that is an example that monetary incentives do work?
This isn't useful for 99% of stuff and pushing every video and music file on earth through a global state machine with the performance characteristics of an Atari from the 80s would render the thing inoperable. The entire Bitcoin network has a bandwidth of like 1mb every 10 minutes, the total size of the blockchain is half a TB in total, people torrent more porn in the time it took me to type this.
Maintaining a global, complete history of transactions only ever made sense for one problem, double spending, and is utterly useless for sharing files.
but nobody said otherwise
Lol no... I dont like interviewing for a new job, why would i agree to get tested for something as stupid as piracy? (Unless... mention me ONE private tracker that doesn't have piracy).
So for 99% of people, my point stands.
There are definitely private trackers that don't have anything like that though (iirc they're called "semi-private trackers"). One i remember using is t411 when it was still running