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Re:Dat: non-profit, secure, and distributed package manager ... by e12e on Wednesday September 27, 2017 @01:36AM (#15345166)
The p2p and security aspects look very interesting[1] - apart from the obvious network effect/existing user base and tooling - are there any reasons to not prefer dat to bittorrent for all the things?

It looks like an interesting way to store/share backups and server images - easily scaling bandwidth and availability with the nerd to spin up new instances, or shifting across data centers?

Maybe also as an apt back-end similar to:

https://wiki.debian.org/DebTorrent

[1] https://docs.datproject.org/security

Re:Dat: non-profit, secure, and distributed package manager ... by tbv on Wednesday September 27, 2017 @09:01AM (#15347324)
To draw a quick contrast between Dat and BitTorrent, BitTorrent magnet links are static, meaning if you change the content, you get an entirely new magnet link. Dat archives (a networked directory, essentially) are mutable, so you can publish modifications at a consistent address.

I’m not familiar with DebTorrent, but if you’re interested to learn more about the innards of Dat, this post by pfraze is a good place to start:

https://beakerbrowser.com/2017/06/19/cryptographically-secur...