Tribler: An attack-resilient micro-economy for media
github.com
github.com
The idea that $10 for a digital copy of an album that is already on youtube (or a friend's harddrive) should be a viable business model is weird to me in this day and age.
I have recently been wondering about a threshold-based "media economy" where creators don't actually show us anything (except for clips or samples or low-res versions, etc) until they are guaranteed a certain amount of income. It's basically kickstarter. A musician makes an album, goes on kickstarter and asks for $10,000 to release it. Once $10k is reached, the songs go up on a server, or are released on bandcamp, spotify, or any of the usual channels. Additional money beyond the threshold can be made, but it will be as difficult as it is now. But they have already reached $10k (set by them) so everyone can feel good that the musician has earned what they feel they deserve.
I'm sure there are many problems with this. For one, many artists aren't creating just for money. They want to show us their creations, and with a threshold, they would have to hold back until it is reached (in the case of musicians, they might not even be able to play a new song at a show until the threshold is reached, b/c smartphones).
There may be a critical mass problem, too. If two artists are similar and one releases immediately while the other waits for the threshold payment, the latter may drift into obscurity. There must be some allure to the withholding, though?
What other problems kill this approach?
Could it work for open source software, too? Make your thing, don't share it. Demo it, ask for the release payment, then put it on github.
I think it would be far more reasonable to put the source into escrow, to be released when a threshold is met. I've seen closed source vendors do that when they're smaller to ensure a large customer is not left high and dry should they go bankrupt or be acquired by someone who kills the product.
I don't foresee anyone being willing to see a demo of a piece of software, then writing a check for it before using it. In the closed source world you pretty much ALWAYS have to do some sort of POV/POC before anyone will buy your stuff.
We now have "Decentralised AI" working in the lab last month. So also the new music discovery, recommendation, fuzzy keyword search, spam filtering can be realised with full decentralisation (in principle). See live demo of our toy example [1]. Broad writeup [2]
[1] https://huggingface.co/spaces/tribler/de-dsi [2] https://torrentfreak.com/researchers-showcase-decentralized-...
A pre-release payment directly addresses the issue of piracy. Piracy just doesn't exist if the content isn't out there.
If we just accept the fact that piracy exists and that people are going to pirate and then ignore that aspect completely and carry on, I think you would be surprised how many people are willing to pay for things they want if the price is reasonable, regardless of whether they can get it for free via another method.
To be fair, that's more for risky ambitious projects like mmorpgs that even AAA devs fail at.
The copyright regime.
Artists (especially music) are currently navigating a very tight legal landscape where the works they are producing might get flagged as infringing even if they took every reasonable precaution. For example: sounds that sound similar to an existing sample, or note progressions that are fiercely defended by companies who use the residuals as their primary income source.
This can cause an issue if the artist releases a work and does not receive enough to defend themselves in court, especially as the work would now be very hard to take down and the artist may even have trouble stopping the income from coming in.
Source: I’ve been thinking about this “everything is released for free once the artist is paid” approach for a while and I think there are some notable wins esp. around the Patreon model where artists can know the eventual payout before they start making. I think it has amazing potential as most content becomes “free” anyway and it would make it so much easier for fans to share openly netting in more plays, more likes, and more fans.
You should start a "media label" then. Take a cut of the threshold payment for (1) vetting and reviews of unreleased art, (2) distribution costs of the digital media, and (3) legal assistance for artists against copyright trolls.
You've re-discovered the purpose of copyright laws.
2x on HN frontpage! Most attention we had during 18 years of coding.
The principle we hope will work is to out-compete abusive platforms. Textbooks say capitalism requires realistic future profit and growth. The goal is to show Wall Street that profitability of Big Tech advertisement model is doomed.
Forming non-profit collectives we aim to organise alternatives which are superior to existing offerings. So you still end up with a monopoly, just under democratic governance. This is in-line with the thinking at European Commission level, DG Grow [0]. We are trying to invent the tech to form digital collectives which scale beyond millions. Very hard. Plus collective decision making. Then you have self-sovereign citizens owning these collectives, not markets.
By design Tribler is self-organising and self-scaling. We have build a DAO using shared Bitcoin capital [1] with one extension using fancy crypto based on FROST [2].
[0] https://etendering.ted.europa.eu/cft/cft-display.html?cftId=... [1] https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/3565383.3566112 [2] https://repository.tudelft.nl/islandora/object/uuid:f45f85a0...
I’m not sure why technology is the “solution” to an alternative… people seem to just want good content delivered well. Content creators want to make as much money as possible. And that’s for “honest” content… the internet is filled with disinformation and people trying to spread conspiracies, recruit for X, or otherwise mass influence the entire population.
How a decentralized Bitcoin based model magically get us amazing content, something people want to use, and minimization of negative forces? Why is technology the key issue?
It might be hard to re-imagine the content industry without the current monopolists. Linux showed how disruptive an open model can be.
See here a description + full implementation of a music industry based on Creative Commons content. Artists release their music and receive direct Bitcoin donations from fans. 100% artists, 0% music label, 0% Big Tech, 0% credit card fee. It's a Bitcoin DAO with Spotify-inspired music discovery.
[1] https://github.com/Tribler/tribler/files/11814767/First.Depl...
It might be hard to re-imagine the content industry without the current monopolists. Linux showed how disruptive an open model can be.
There is a stark difference between the case of Linux and content. In the case of Linux, ROI is measurable in dollars. In the case of content, value is in large part the perception of customers.
This is going to be very difficult in the particular use case of news media, which is arguably the most critical area. We're already in a situation there where "value" is in the form of the strengthening of biases and misinformation.
The point here, is that to succeed, Tribler might have to find a niche where superior value generation becomes undeniably obvious to some sizable segment. (Perhaps music can serve this function.)
So running Tribler and reporting bug in Github. We are in desperate need of Win/Mac/Linux users which will help us with reproduce bugs. One time we found bugs in Python Async IO standard lib [1]. The 'once in a week' bugs are difficult to capture.
Suppose I want to download a torrent that's only seeded by one person running Deluge. My understanding was that this would involve making a connection to another Tribler user, and that user making the connection to that seeder. That would make every client a sort of exit node for bittorrent traffic, even for torrents they don't download. Is that not how it works?
From the https://tribler.org homepage it's very hard to figure out what tribler actually is, and the only screenshots are hidden away in the support and developer categories, and all feature vastly different menu items (without clear indication how to get those features, if they even still exist). The API documentation isn't linked anywhere.
And while installing the client and downloading your first torrent is easy enough, there isn't a lot of info on how to do anything else. And the help that does exist is outdated or wrong. The https://www.tribler.org/howto.html seems to be for a completely different version than what I get when I download and install the Windows version, and 3 out of 4 steps don't work as described (The text in 2 is completely wrong/outdated, I don't even have the menu item for 3, nor the icon for 4)
From the buzzwords, some kind of crypto scheme:
"Micro-economy", "self-sovereign", "reward content creators directly", "micro-economy without banks", "fully distributed ledgers".
It reads like crypto bolted onto torrents.
- No global consensus
which I think sets it quite apart from anything on a blockchain.
https://github.com/Tribler/tribler/wiki/%22TrustChain%22-arc...
But not much else about it. Would be interested to read more. Using torrent seeding as a form of Proof-of-Work that rewards tokens is actually an interesting use case for cryptocurrency, and not as energy-hungry. But no global consensus is different from any crypto I've ever heard of. How does it keep a consistent ledger or who owns what tokens?
Edit: full explanation here - https://github.com/Tribler/tribler/wiki/The-design-of-a-trus...
Better, says my gut, to let either sides of a contradiction compete for legitimacy in the eyes of whatever local audiences are relevant.
Assuming consensus from the get go just doesn't seem to square with how large groups of people actually work.
So I hope that these alternatives work out for them because I'd like to have more examples to point at when I try to express this.
Though, due to positive feedback and winner-take-all effects in complex systems like human economies, I don't believe that's a stable equilibrium. The critical resources of systems will concentrate and consolidate over time. The question is whether there's any way to manage that in the architecture or protocol to minimize the resulting harm, or whether it's better not to try.
Once the winners take all, they tend to redecorate such that their power is easy to keep and hard to lose. Once they've done that, they don't have to worry so much about continuing to display whatever merits made them winners in the first place. No need to deliver on whatever promises made. No need to support whatever products sold. You're on top, your enemies are pre-crushed, you can now relax.
I agree that protecting our ability to revoke their legitimacy is not a path to a stable equilibrium. It'll take work to ensure that they can not in fact relax. But I think it's work worth doing. Much like how a farmer selects cultivars based on their desirable properties, so should should the masses wield their ability to revoke legitimacy and artificially select a more desirable culture among their leadership.
...which is why consistency is the wrong part of the CAP theorem to preserve. It makes it possible for the powerful to forbid states where they're later not powerful by labeling those states "inconsistent". If you have consistency, revoking their legitimacy means abandoning the protocol.
If inconsistency is possible, you don't have to rebuild anything. Instead just reconfigure your part of it to trust different people.
Look how receptive these comments have been so far, that's a clear sign of HN's bias.
We have something much older then Bitcoin. It's a simple ledger who helped whom in the network. Simple case of earning points by helping others.
Economically, its complex. Coin creation is decentralised, everybody prints their own 'money'. The value of that help-currency is based on how connected you are to the globally connected transaction graph. Then we maintain fairness in this micro-economy against freeriders. See study with 160 million trust records and 95k users [1].
[1] https://research.tudelft.nl/files/89353583/1_s2.0_S138912862...
Then it's flawed. There's a reason why all earlier implementations failed. They were incomplete.
https://bitinfocharts.com/comparison/bitcoin-transactionfees...
But, you have to admit the crypto community hasn't done itself any favors: Hype and endless promises that never came to fruition, astronomical transaction fees, frictionful technologies, exhausting volume of promising ("world-changing!") projects that under delivered (putting it mildly), rug pulls, thefts, and other outright scams, massive use cases for money laundering and criminal activity.
Kind of hard to stay positive through all of that.
"Numerous other projects try to create a generic approach using an ICO for funding and promising the early adopters a dazzling return-on-investment. Tribler is different. rant warning. We are non-profit academics. We do not want to replace the old elite with a new crypto-currency elite. What is changed if we replace backroom deals, lobbyists, middleman, and legal monopolies with the tools of the new elite: algorithms, early investor rewards, proof-of-dominating-stake, and smart contracts? Replacing the analog world and breading digital-native inequality does not make the world a better place."
totally agreed, that's my problem with all of the bitcoin hype - it's mostly there to make the early investments more profitable which doesn't excite me much
So like middlemen and the big businesses that exist now? Crypto democratizes
I like cryptography, the blockchain, decentralization etc. but the pitch of almost every ICO is- get in now and become massively rich (at the expense of people joining later), almost the exact same dynamic as investing in a company like Visa.
If we're talking about investing in currencies, anyone that could have made the same kind of investment in today's major currencies would have had to do it so long ago that they're dead now.
If we're talking about investing in smaller entities, then you have the opportunity to get on the ground level of a thousand companies every day. That's not something that needs crypto.
But, yeah I relate to the comment in your last paragraph. There was a lot of of early talk about democratization, etc. but at the end of the day it seemed to be more about replacing the old centralized incumbents with new ones. Or, in some cases, just giving the old incumbents a new way to extend their incumbencies. There was really nothing to insulate the space from the latter. This all became really apparent during the "DeFi" craze.
I do think a lot of earnest folks got caught up in the hype and were sincerely invested in the idea of democratization. The scammers and grifters just seemed to overwhelm the idealism. The Web3 hype was probably the apotheosis, before it popped. What's interesting is how much VCs seemed to rush into that space, yet there was barely a whisper when it all came crashing down.
Kind of makes you wonder what it was really all about.
Some of the technologies were/are interesting. It just seemed that, even so, the applications never fully materialized. So the tech started to feel like solutions looking for problems. And, after a while, the excitement of the promise wears thin.
A lot of the proposed use cases were duplicative of existing capabilities and were frequently some variation of, "but, this is trustless/decentralized". I just don't think that was as compelling as assumed for most people who routinely give up their data, location, etc. in exchange for convenience. And, the crypto-based "solutions" frequently required tech experience and/or some inconvenience to onboard. Turns out, centralization is pretty convenient.
Then, after all of that, we're still left with some form of centralization in the form of node operators, foundations, etc.
So, there was frequently a gap between the tech and the social aspect.
Other use cases were a little grifty from the start.
Does "people don't like my idea, they must be biased" apply to murders, urethral sounding, and kicking puppies? Have you considered the possibility that some concepts earn hostility?
yes, i am biased against putting my hand on a burning stove top.
FC built a sufficiently decentralized platform, which seems to align with Tribler. They already have apps to compete with twitter/reddit (warpcast), tiktok (drakula), and others. A video service would be a great fit in the ecosystem.
It’s just a natural consequence that this creates scarcity.
If you think it's concerned about screens, you're wrong. It's concerned about "did this person really do this"?
Cyberspace does not exist without the physical substrate of compute resources.
> Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind.
In Dec 1960 we "decentralised communication", now called The Internet. Bittorrent decentralised broadcasting, leading to streaming revolution. Bitcoin pioneered decentralised money.
At Delft University I've worked for 25 years to decentralised trust, democracy, and economic cooperation in general. As an academic this focus on running code and societal change obviously kills you career protects. See my writing from prior century on "Open Information Pools" (pre-wikipedia era) [0]. Essentially what others called the Global Brain.
We deployed a decentralised trust algorithm based on the interaction graph to 94k people, see [1]. Theoretical foundations are based on proving that the Harvard impossibility result against Sybil attacks made too strict assumptions, [2]. Leading to trust scores with resilience against fake identities: MeritRank [3]. This is being released in first version in this Tribler version. So hopefully this trust framework will help stop spammers a bit. We now pioneered "Decentralised AI", that critically relies on such a trust framework to function in a trustworthy manner [4].
[0] https://www.usenix.org/conference/2000-usenix-annual-technic... [1] https://research.tudelft.nl/files/89353583/1_s2.0_S138912862... [2] https://pure.tudelft.nl/ws/files/96914542/p1263.pdf [3] https://arxiv.org/pdf/2207.09950 [4] https://huggingface.co/spaces/tribler/de-dsi
Thanks for working so hard on a such an admirable project.
>[tor-dev] N reasons why the spooks love Tribler (Number N' will surprise you)
EDIT: Had a chance to look through it now, looks like they addressed all the concerns back by 2015
i.e.
1. Replacing the custom crypto code with more standard libraries (looks like they settled on NACL/libsodium's implementations).
2. Switched to AES-GCM and then later ChaChaPoly
3. Fixed up the tor protocol issues too.
Probably more but there's a lot going on.
For example one big media outlet could adopt Tribler. At first everyone rejoices because it is recognition but what if it turns out to be an attack? How is Tribler resilient against taking over from Corporate?
Of course, it's Open Source and everybody can fork. But still, could an attack be possible?
Is the intent to have multiple tribler-like instances serving different (content) domains or more of a one-spot search that content providers can serve their content through? I ask as I'm wondering about how you foresee this "degrading" as it scales as that is where most current content platforms fail apart as they try to grow/maximize audience.
With increased load that website, discovery server, or load balancer gets overloaded. With Tribler we decentralised everything to the extreme of Bitcoin and Bittorrent. So there is no "degrading", as long as the freeriders are somehow detected. See our 2007 architectural documents [1]
[1] https://git.gnunet.org/bibliography.git/plain/docs/Concurren...
What we really need is alternative moderation. The most fragile/vulnerable part of traditional torrent trackers is centralized forums. It's also the most problematic aspect of social media. A successful decentralized alternative to content moderation would drastically change the world.
At that point hidden seeding and downloading were both done via tor-like outproxies, eg, out to the regular internet. I recall talk from the issues page about intra-tribler media, eg, anonymised from end to end - does anyone know if this has been achieved?
[1] https://github.com/Tribler/tribler/wiki/Hidden-Services-Spec...
If somebody seeds Independence Day 2 and by some miracle becomes the most seeded movie, how does that somebody cash out his tokens?
If somebody wants to download Independence Day 2 what and how is it being converted into tokens?
For a "decentralized youtube" to ever make sense, the problems that need solving are how to compensate content-creators/owners, and how to prevent piracy.
We're now multiplexing everything on 1 port. If you use our Tor-like decentralised onion routing feature that works. Sadly, in normal mode we need two forwarded ports. Both Libtorrent download lib and our decentralised gossip requires their own port. We gossip about trust, content discovery, and torrent health.
How can this be possible in a non-centralized manner?
It's just not commonly done because you have to build and maintain a web of trust for it to to work, and that's often a level of user responsibility that's hard to cultivate. But if you need that web of trust anyway (e.g. for filtering out ads ad other disinformation) then you might as well use it for consensus about who is a good citizen and who is not.
(I have no idea if this is Tribler's approach, it's just on my mind because I've been designing something quite like Tribler, and it's my approach.)
when the software that nodes are running see another compliant node, they expect for it to be rewarded so they all conform to the additional issuance of tokens
you just need to make sure that sybil attack attempts improve the network, as the attacker adds more nodes to earn more
> We have something much older then Bitcoin
the paper they link just show that by harming newcomers to the network you reduce free loaders, but they interpret that it solves fraud.
The political problem was that I refused to alter statistical data for a "scientist" that wanted to publish that women after abortion develop mental health issues. They search my job computer for something to kill me and found tribler cache.
https://www.publico.es/actualidad/rioja-paga-estudios-salud-...
It was hard. Lost job, six years under juditial prosecution... at the end, the case was dismissed, I could show that the torrent cache was not personal, but the damage was great.
Be careful if you are an activist or have political involvement. I'm unaware of the workings of the current version, hope it encrypts the torrent cache somehow.
In this case, it downloads random torrent _metadata_ right? How could the case be brought with just metadata? Regardless of whether the torrent cache was personal or not, if it was just metadata it still didn't contain anything illegal
if you're contributing to a distributed index where people are searching and retrieving material thanks to the meta data on your drive, IMHO that's pretty close to distribution
Google also links to illegal data and actually Google is probably the largest distributor illegal data in human history (if by "distribution" we include linking)
Otherwise what is actually being legislated here is that search engines must be centralized, cementing Google's stranglehold on this field
if they argue nonsense and the judge buys, it's that.
law enforcement uses hashes of bad content. torrent conveniently uses hashes. the expert can argue if you have the hash you have the content because how torrent works.
the judge that accepted the argument about how torrent works but refused the argument about how tribler or freenet etc works should be disbarred imho.