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There is no crypto in Tribler.

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...

Tribler does not include a Tor exit node!

Indeed, its not about the tech. Changing the business model is key.

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...

We love to have more help! Hardest part is debugging.

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.

[1] https://github.com/Tribler/tribler/pull/7926

We simply iterate on Linux and Wikipedia work.

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...

Yes, you can do end-to-end encrypted hidden seeding. See technical docs (slightly outdated) [1]. Everything in Python was too slow. With Rust implementation we get 10x the speed, 160 Mbit/s anon tunneling.

[1] https://github.com/Tribler/tribler/wiki/Hidden-Services-Spec...

Glad to hear it! Indeed, most platforms have a central point of failure somewhere. Note that Bittorrent swarms never get overloaded, we use that same technique: extreme decentralisation.

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...

Whistleblowing documentary spreading in Europe or upper Americas might go OK with solid operational measures such as open wifi war driving, etc. China, Russia, etc: nope.

thnx Qem for you enduring patience!

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.

Tribler founding professor here, AMA.

2x on HN frontpage! Most attention we had during 18 years of coding.

Our university is cycling distance from Amsterdam, everything is legal there.

But more seriously, it is indeed difficult to work on CyberPunk 2.0 topics within a university. Solid question! As an academic you critically rely on incoming grant money, so my strategy for past decades have been to discover what the real problems are before they become hype.

That means you need to need to run your research team as a startup. Very few academic thinkers. We discover what is hard using our deployment-first methodology [1]. We have 2.3 million downloads of our distributed system. Our "Bandwidth as a currency" used a ledger in aug 2007 [2]. That became a big hit in jan 2009 with Bitcoin. Gave us a few years headstart for funding on others. In 2012 we had Internet deployment of fully decentralised machine learning (SGD) [3]. This showed the need for a global web-of-trust.

[1] https://arxiv.org/pdf/2301.04508 [2] http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/6971904.stm [3] http://www.kl.csko.hu/projektek/msc_thesis.pdf

Magnetico is pioneering work. Very simple, very effective. However, with a single 1 Gbps VPS you can take it down. Simply spam at full speed and switch VPN reguarly. Same for Bitmagnet.

Usenet, email and now Mastodon show that you need a trust framework. Otherwise you open to abuse and spam. With Tribler we're hoping that after 3 generations of failures/learnings we now have operational decentralised trust. See our public thinking for 11 years on Github [1].

[1] https://github.com/Tribler/tribler/issues/31

yes! Spam is real and every stranger could be a spammer. Decentralised trust is the cornerstone of our work. Big topic 25 years ago around the Pagerank patent time. Now we are one of the last remaining academic teams on this topic.

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.

[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

Tribler founding professor here, AMA. repo stuff: https://github.com/Tribler/tribler/wiki#current-items-under-...

32 pages of legal details to induce solid sleep: https://torrentfreak.com/images/cox-opinion.pdf

"We affirm the jury’s finding of willful contributory infringement. But we reverse the vicarious liability verdict and remand for a new trial on damages because Cox did not profit from its subscribers’ acts of infringement, a legal prerequisite for vicarious liability."

Impressive 20 year project by one key developer.

See 20 year post in German by YaCy founder: https://community.searchlab.eu/t/yacy-vor-20-jahren/1543

Or to generalise: 'Eat your own dogfood'

Scientific version with nuance of why it might be a bad practice in cases: https://www.computer.org/csdl/magazine/so/2006/03/s3005/13rR...

> needs to be some servers available to facilitate the holepunching

Not needed. Other phones can help you determine connectable ports. You can create a phone-to-phone overlay and even puncture carrier-grade NATs. See our birthday paradox attack and initial dozen SIM cards measurements: https://arxiv.org/abs/2311.04658 Older university project, similar to Holepunch with more dev docs: github.com/Tribler/trustchain-superapp/

Very impressive engineering work. Their custom-manufactured hardware must have taken years to develop. All on a non-commercial university low-budget. Energy saving gains are very impressive.

This brings back fond memories of failures and (small) fires. (23 years ago I wrote the early Linux device driver for dynamic voltage scaling)

Here are 63 slowly explaining this system: https://eh17.easterhegg.eu/Fahrplan/system/event_attachments...

Quinte neat. It simply using open source to preserve the existing financial players. Financial intermediaries are not eliminated.

> vigorously defending online speech and more aggressively policing content on the platform

It goes beyond content moderation. Please remember the root cause of failure: fraudulent bots to push lies.

More fake humans exist on Facebook than real. 12.3 billion fake Facebook profiles have been removed in two years (2021-2022). See statistics from quaterly Facebook reports [1]. That puts the "largest population on earth" Zuck quotes in another light. [1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/1013474/facebook-fake-ac...

Tribler developer here.

The "Trust framework" that everybody is after: lightness of tit-for-tat with little overhead. With trust that actually can make The Internet a nice place again! Curation is indeed the problem discovered by HN practitioners such yourself. However, nobody in academia is working on this. As one old scientific article is titled: "Curation, Curation, Curation"

Indeed very half-baked.

This must be quite an insult to the inventor of fully decentralised AI. In 2012 Prof. Jelasity invented gradient mining with SGD, https://arxiv.org/pdf/1109.1396 Works reasonably well, you probably also need a ledger like Trustchain for accountability and Sybil protection. Consensus is too costly. This problem is unsolved and actively worked on academia for decades.

> There didn't seem to be a call to arms then. The first time I heard about it was September 1, and it was this, you know, like, whoops, we've got a problem.

They seem to have significant problems. Its broader then "not discovering" 5 minus 1 million of documents. There seems to be multiple smoking guns in evidence: https://www.justice.gov/d9/2023-09/416652.pdf Google internal Email instruct: never to talk about 'market share' or even 'markets'. This is clear and deliberate behaviour to evade government regulators. It is institutionalised through legal training class 101.

Disclaimer: not a lawyer, CS professor with some courtroom experience.

Lets take the bait Internet! 2017 Debunk of this story: https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/alien-mummy-peru/

Technical DNA report of 24 pages with awesome URL: https://www.the-alien-project.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/12... Done by these people in Mexico, with failing website: www.linkedin.com/company/abraxas-biosystems/about/

``` To proceed with the NGS run a library of the fragments to sequence has to be prepared first. This library preparation method was performed by CEN4GEN using a specialized protocol proprietary of CEN4GEN labs and reagents kits based on a commercial kit called Kapa Hyper Prep that were optimal to recover fragmented DNA for ancient samples. The results of the library construction methods were successfully performed for the 3 MDA amplified samples as shown below. ```

> Apple silicone with its unified memory architecture, GPU and Neural cores is very well placed for local LLMs.

Yes, university research from 2011 already showed a privacy focused design to machine learning[1]. But will this be private or public like Wikipedia, Bitcoin and Bittorrent?

> Effectively an extension to your own brain.

Correct. After 1996 fantasy/visionary publications about this, we now know roughly how to do this. Most difficult problem is who should own it, no corporation in control is desired. That means full decentralisation, federated learning is not enough.

But fully decentralised learning is hard. Try to apply machine learning in permissionless, byzantine, unsupervised, decentralised, adversarial, continuous learning context. See my lab at Delft University focused for a decade already on "The Global Brain"[2]. With 2.3 million download and crowd-sourcing, we might get there..

[1] "Gossip Learning with Linear Models on Fully Distributed Data", 2011, https://arxiv.org/abs/1109.1396

[2] The Global Brain - the roadmap, https://github.com/Tribler/tribler/issues/7064

> going to make an impact in AI/LLMs

This seems to be made for mass parallelism.

Question: Would this scale to 100 million of collaborating 4G/5G smartphones? We have operational federated learning code and decentralised learning code (trivial stochastic gradient descent). Application: simple learn-to-Rank based on ClickLogs like its 2005 [1]. Then you have a true decentralised Google.

Would love to link RWKV to other pure decentralised tech. In the past we have build the first self-compiling Android app and first Android-to-Android P2P overlay network. Without any helper peers for carrier-grade NAT puncturing. My university systems lab lacks the size to keep up with the recent pace of innovation.

[1] https://grouplens.org/beyond2005/full/pouwelse.pdf

Thnx for writing! In academia we're getting the next step operational: training on Android. Any advise for us what to watch out for?

Obviously you need a bit of patience and lots of volunteer devices. With unsupervised continuous learning this is solved, in emulation. See "G-Rank: Unsupervised Continuous Learn-to-Rank for Edge Devices in a P2P Network" [1]. Optimal learning rate is left as an exercise for the developer. (disclaimer: our own work, I run a lab with "systems for peer-to-peer machine learning")

[1] https://arxiv.org/abs/2301.12530

Fascinating material, significant progress in learn-to-rank and semantic clustering lately. For those who want to dive deeper, state-of-the-art decentralised learning from academia:

https://arxiv.org/abs/2301.12530 "G-Rank: Unsupervised Continuous Learn-to-Rank for Edge Devices in a P2P Network", published today. Disclaimer: I'm the supervising professor.

A survey on the Web3 path towards enabling long term digital cooperation through decentralised trust