It feels like you could factor off the trust requirements into a much smaller kernel, though.

For example, you could operate (your instance of) your pseudo-legal service yourself, but open-source the codebase (sticking it on GitHub even) and accept patches from anyone.

You could also implement a simple replication architecture for your service, where at any time one node (yours) is considered to be the 'canonical master', and then other nodes can join the network as slaves, receive replicated state, and run as mirrors. Sort of like Linux package repository mirrors.

With such a setup, arresting the original maintainer just means 1. a codebase fork by a new maintainer, and 2. a (probably manual) network master-node election.

And that's just a setup that lets you stay in complete control without having to trust anybody (since you still "own" the codebase, and the master node, until you disappear.) If you are willing to relinquish control to the system itself, you could just build your service on a DHT or a signed store-and-forward hierarchy or a blockchain or whatever. There's no reason that things that are essentially "a BitTorrent tracker exposed through a website" need to have their canonical state anywhere at all.

You just described what.cd.

What.cd open sourced Gazelle, the source code for the website and tracker. The core development team accepts pull requests, but they are themselves insulated from the owner and operator of what.cd.

Since opening Gazelle, many other private trackers have adopted it.

Yes, the code is open, but the state of the what.cd tracker and website is not. If they were taken down, the service would cease to exist.

I doubt. In the recent thread linked on the homepage you can read they have quite contingency measures in place. If some government seized all production wcd servers tomorrow, I believe it would be running back after a few days.

Things like IPFS[0] address this problem.

[0] https://ipfs.io/

A distributed blockchain sounds right. Now imagine that "mining" for this blockhchain is serving torrents, and you have to spend currency to download. The currency can be sold for monetary currency (e.g. dollars or bitcoin), so leechers could pay seeders.

What problem are you trying to solve? Downloading torrents works fine. The weak link is the search engine and description-host.

and soon you'd have monopolies seeding and the whole decentralization fades.

I think you just discovered the first actual use case for ethereum. Albeit, the architecture would have to be a little different and there's a lot of complications in that.

It wouldn't surprise me one bit if ethereum came to be a way to host illegal websites considering bitcoins main market is for illegal transactions.

bitcoins main market is speculative investment, its a good hedge against inflation

I'd also wager more communication makes more vulnerabilities. Thinking back to lulzsec and dread pirate Roberts, both were caught thanks to communication.

To add to this even more, Lulzsec got outed by a member who chose to cooperate with the FBI, and in doing so got a reduced sentence. So in many ways, your security is entirely dependent on the security of everybody else - if they don't hide their identity well, then your identity can be in jeopardy too.

If someone starts cooperating with some type of law enforcement you're screwed, and if anybody gets caught and is facing a 50 year charge unless they cooperate, you can probably bet on which one they'll choose.

At least one CP group managed well: https://web.archive.org/web/20130119025623/http://dee.su/upl... "PGP & alt.anonymous maildrops, rotating keys regularly, where the bust only happened because a member was busted for non-ring-related problems and the only busted members were violating the Hushmail lesson by using a third-party service."

This is the major hurdle in all criminal endeavor.