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Comment by dannyw | Hacker News Reader

I wonder if there’s a “git over BitTorrent”.

Having a cryptographically signed (by authors, not by GitHub) and fully open source git hosting network would be a boom for FOSS security in general.

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https://radicle.xyz/

close but it does not use Bittorrent for the P2P part?

Bittorrent as a distribution protocol is not suitable for Git-like traffic, so Radicle is doing their own p2p.

As I understand, Bittorrent is not a persistent data structure. Git and IPFS are. Radicle is another interesting approach. They used IPFS but switched to a custom protocol, as I understand, for performance.

IPFS can do that

https://docs.ipfs.tech/how-to/host-git-repo/

Or we can simply have a git hoster which is not in the US and as such is not impacted by DCMA

US copyright tends to be less restrictive and more relaxed than many other countries.

Not true as you can see here.

The DMCA is crazy though, you can just request a takedown and the onus is on the host. And then if it turns out you didn't actually have the right to do that... well that has to be sorted out later.

Yeah... presumed guilty

The overarching terms of the DMCA are specified by the 1996 WIPO Copyright Treaty, which every developed country has implemented.

It might be, but enforcement is a different thing. For example russian search engines are not blocking streaming websites like US/EU ones do.

Countries don't care about copyright until they make stuff worth stealing.

Seriously. When is this happening?

Broadly speaking, it's inevitable that some jurisdiction will decide to observe the unclothed emperor here and create a legal framework without the yoke of all of this "intellectual property". Obviously, it will thrive, and everyone will flock to use services there.

What then?

We need rutracker of github

What’s stopping you from making torrents of your repos now?

(Not as a rhetorical question; I don’t quite understand your vision, so I’m hoping you’ll clarify the usage.)

They are probably talking about a "serverless" bittorrent. Some kind of Git-over-DHT. It would require this to be accepted: http://bittorrent.org/beps/bep_0050.html (Decentralized Mutable Torrent)

Ooh, I really like this idea! A decentralized form of pub-sub based git sounds fantastic. Of course, much of what makes github et.al. desirable, is the extras on top. Pull Requests, Issues, Wiki, search, etc. Making a “local first” decentralized GitHub would be much work.

Is it? I imagine you only really have to build a different persistence backend. Then, everything else can go through that.

Git in itself is designed to be distributed.

Check out Fossil SCM, from the creator of SQLite.

The torrents would be snapshots of the repo at a particular point in time. Updates couldn't be fetched through the torrent via git pull.

I'd assume that op wants a torrent that can be pushed/pulled from.

git is decentralized by design. you dont need bittorrent.

No. With BitTorrent, I can tell a client to go fetch this torrent or hash (magnet link) and it can do that without any specific hardcoded server. Centralized trackers help but there’s always the DHT. With git you need to give the client an exact host, which can be gone for any number of reasons.

So then just like with music and movies, I'll get letters from law firms for hosting illegal git repos via BitTorrent.

Git is a decentralized service.

We have https://radicle.xyz/

Often discussed here.

However, many Hacker News commenters love to bash it because it is associated with cryptocurrencies.

Git commit messages could be cryptographically signed. And git, the protocol is fully open source. Also there are many open source UI. Care to explain what is the usecase of git of torrent compared to gitlab?

Distributed hosting means there isn't a single point of failure. Even without DMCAs it's fairly common to try cloning a random gitlab or plain git repo only to find it's down.

I have multiple torrent downloads pending for more than an year. Just because it is distributed doesn't mean it is safe from being lost.

Nobody is arguing that, but it's certainly less likely to go down or be lost than a typical direct download link. It's also easier/cheaper to self-host very popular repos with P2P, because it scales nicely.

As much as it pains me to say this this might be a good use of blockchain

Care to explain? If you just mean verified tree, git already is that.

I think he means uncensorable or at least very very hard to censor.

The problem is it could be very expensive. Think NFT but the metadata is the source code of the emulator. You're not removing that from the blockchain, ever. It also needs to be a popular blockchain, like ETH, BTC, SOL or whatever people still use today.

There are "coins" where your stake is disk space but if it's not a widespread thing it just dies off (conway GoL style)

I think he's referring to the distributed portion of a blockchain. A centralized github-type for profit business is required to respond to these takedown requests. Nintendo's lawyers would need to go after every individual node hosting this vc blockchain.

Blockchain is just a slow database. What you want is a peer to peer system which actually has peers instead of a couple super nodes and ephemeral drive-by clients.

"Just" a slow database that allows coordinated writes in a decentralized way, effectively solving the Byzantine Generals problem. That's what made Bitcoin a novel idea.

How does it solve the Byzantine generals problem?

By proof-of-work consensus. This makes attacks costly, basically they have to spend more resources than half the network, hence the name "51% attack".

The Bitcoin whitepaper [0] is a very accesible read, but the revolutionary ideas are not immediately obvious.

[0] https://www.bitcoin.com/bitcoin.pdf

I agree, at least in theory (not sure if any existing blockchains could adequately solve the problem today). Someday, you could imagine essentially running gitlab on a blockchain. Actually, it's not a stretch to include access control such as public key management, "Issues", etc. It would be publicly readable, not censorable, no single point of failure, and unlike torrents, fully mutable. Obviously, today the cost would probably be prohibitive for most purposes.

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