I did not mean to imply that VideoCoin solves this issue, just that it is, in my opinion, a clever and functional solution to one or two pieces of this very large puzzle.
> The point isn't to make it impossible for content to vanish, the point is to make it easy for people who do care to archive and share the content that they care about.
My personal opinion is that anything truly viable and useful will need to do both, at least to the extent that this can be done. I have a huge problem with content availability being so dependent on popularity (and likely also temporal factors) and don't really think a system that doesn't inherently support content longevity (whether peers like the content or not) could be considering a big improvement over YouTube or centralized options.
If I had my way, I think a hybrid approach of some sort would be the place to start -- let peers explicitly choose to mirror and help distribute content they care about, but also force all nodes to also devote some % of whatever they're allocating to the platform to mirroring anything the network has chosen to give them after various calculations intended to maximize data integrity and performance.
Right now I think of any video on youtube as temporary and archive any videos I think there's any chance of wanting to watch later using youtube-dl.
I'm not sure I follow. Peertube works without peers. I maintain an instance for my personal videos, most of them have maybe 5-6 views total, and they'll still work fine whenever anyone visits the server. The peers are only there to handle bandwidth spikes and scaling.
And if you're worried that my server will go down, other instances can just mirror it.
Of course, if I stop hosting the content and nobody else mirrors it, it will disappear. But from my understanding of VideoCoin, nothing seems to be different there at first glance. If I stop paying for people to host my video on VideoCoin, are random nodes just going to keep storing it for free?
I'm trying to think of any distributed storage system that actually solves the problem of unknown content disappearing. Filecoin & IPFS don't remove the need to pay for storage, torrents still need to be seeded. The point isn't to make it impossible for content to vanish, the point is to make it easy for people who do care to archive and share the content that they care about.