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Comment by sktrdie | Hacker News Reader

Just read through the article, not sure I get what's the novel thing here. Any insights?

Torrent tracker websites that provide us with magnet links may be taken down. If there is a search function which can run locally on the computer, there is no vulnerable node in the decentralized network which could be targeted.

You still need to bootstrap and maintain DHT/torrent corpus state/data in a potentially adversarial environment, correct? Solving for durable storage seems to be a challenge to overcome (unless that itself is served as a mutable torrent? or append only immutable torrents?).

The adversarial environment may become friendly if the web of trust idea materializes. Otherwise yeah, the proposed search method would encounter issues.

Could you perhaps (at a cost) burn magnet links for each torrent into the Ethereum blockchain? This would enable any node to mount and scan the ledger in a way that would be challenging to prevent, considering the financial incentives for the network to persist. Someone else is operating the decentralized, durable storage system for you.

It's a hard problem to solve, see SciHub, Libgen, Anna's Archive, etc.

For sure that could be done. I guess the benefit of having an ML search engine is that it may be able to infer what you're looking for even though you can't exactly name it.

But yeah, you're right. Burning magnet links into Ethereum seems like it might work decently, never thought of that.

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