When downloading from "reputable torrent tracker XYZ" you can trust the quality of the torrent, that it is virus free, etc ... It is also usually make searching for particular torrent easier (less like searching for a nail in a hay stack) and you avoid spreading the seeding potential to hundreds of similar torrents.
As a extreme example, BakaBT (a private torrent for anime/manga related torrent) has a strict "no duplicate torrent" policy. This means that if you are searching for the OST of a specific show, you will have usually only one result and it's the most up-to-date, highest quality version. Since it is the only option, everyone seed this one. It really diminish the issue of abandoned torrents. To "replace" and existing torrent, you have to provide a strictly better version.
A decentralized torrent search engine could not do that. The real value of torrent tracker are the community.
That is also why decentralized software like eMule/eDonkey lost a lot of popularity to torrent tracker: Lots of duplication, very dodgy download, no curation, virus, ....
Couldn't some form of blockchain work here? Like couldn't some form of distributed/democratized community curation and moderation happen by using the blockchain to manage the arbitration of new torrents (and their successors, like when the community decides New Random Anime X encoding to be a superior copy)? Plus you have proof of stake or whatever the leading mechanism is to help combat and filter out fakes/illegal activity (etc)?
Then you'd have blockchain managing the trackers and torrents managing the file sharing.
Blockchain sounds lile experimental engineering
Even if it is theoretically possible, it create a huge barrier for entry, a lot of user friction, issue with governance and distribution of power, exploit, etc. And it is extremely hard to put in place for something that can be replaced by a generic phpBB forum in an afternoon. It is like trying to make a ICBM to kill a fly.
In the Bitcoin world, Ordinals have started to make waves as they are a creative use of unintended consequences. This will likely spur other innovations.
In the EVM world, DeFi is still used all the time. It lost a lot of steam from the last bull run, but trading, be your own bank, interest arbitrage, options, perps, all of that is still going on quite a bit. New sites are popping up all the time. LybraFinance LUSD/eUSD is one of the more recent ones.
And cryptocurrency is usually used for illegal stuff, so it is not necessarily desirable.
How I can take out a collateralized loan, anywhere in the world, without having to ask for approval?
On the person 'supplying trust & owned property and getting a stablecoin loan', the other side of some Dai loans, there is real value being created there as they can use cheaper credit to invest in their business.
Most of the value goes to people in places like Argentina & Nigeria facing massive inflation who are now able to hold an asset that is backed to the dollar and overcollaterized by crypto & real properties held in the West, which is a better option than pretty much anything they can get in their home country.
1. There is no restriction that the asset being borrowed and the collateral are in the same asset class - loans can be extended based on whatever criteria the DAO in charge of the Dai votes on. There are a number of loans backed by real property investments in the US, see [0] under RWA. There are a number of loans also backed by large holdings in US bonds.
2. Dai is pegged to the dollar. It can be instantly exchanged with the dollar at a number of onramps. It is not equivalent to holding volatile crypto like ethereum.
[0]: daistats.com
> How I can take out a collateralized loan, anywhere in the world, without having to ask for approval?
I agree that the overcollateralized loans backed by crypto are less useful unless you want to be investing crypto, which is what I mentioned at the beginning of my comment. I am not the commentator who said the thing about anywhere in the world without approval.
Loans in decentralised finance use smart contracts, instead of relying on the legal system.
Code over law.
Huh? That confused the heck out of me. How would you get the same car that you're renting in a different color?
What you do with the borrowed funds is up to you and there are an endless stream of possibilities. One example is to re-lend out again for additional interest. Interest arbitrage is a way to make your existing capital, work for you.
Lend BTC +1%, Borrow ETH -3%, Stake ETH +5%. 2% profit on the ETH and 1% on the BTC. Of course, you could then sell the profits for say, USDC, which you can then lend out again (~4%) or use to pay your bills or drug habit or whatever...
At the end of the day, this is what banks do with your funds. But instead of giving them the vast majority of the interest, why not take the interest yourself?
Larger picture, I personally see this as the opposite of credit cards, which are a blight on society [0]. People go into debt that they may or may not be able to pay off in the future. Why not reverse that and teach people to not spend more than they can pay off (collateralized loans)? You're punished with liquidations instead of stupid high interest rates.
[0] https://www.cnet.com/personal-finance/credit-cards/americans...
I have 1 BTC, worth $27,000 today.
I lend that 1 BTC. I'm getting 1% on it. This is better than the pet rock that it otherwise is.
I can then borrow safely 50% of the value of that BTC, so $13,500 worth of goods. Now, I've magically given myself an additional $13,500, that I didn't have before.
The price of BTC would have to drop 50% before I'd be liquidated (some of my BTC would be automatically sold to cove the loan). Certainly, BTC can drop 50% in value... but if you are paying attention, you should have more than enough time to pay back that loan or add more BTC. In practice, BTC drops that much slowly over time (like a month or two), not in one go. It also works the other way, if BTC gains in value, you have less to worry about.
Let's say I pick to borrow ETH ($1800). I can now borrow 7.5 ETH at 3%. I can then lend that 7.5 ETH at 5%. I can then take those 5% earnings and sell those or even restake them.
Money legos. None of this requires permission or credit reports, just transactions on a blockchain. If you use a chain that has far lower fees (like Polygon, Arbitrium, Avalanche), then the fees are a rounding error in the cost of operations.
I do see the distinction you're trying to make though. That's why I qualified it with the word "collaterlized".
Let me also correct you: "Let's say you have one bitcoin. Your funds available for spending are $27,000".
No, we're not talking about selling the bitcoin. There is no 'spending' here. What you're doing is borrowing against the value of the bitcoin that you're holding. You don't need to sell it, you're using it as collateral. The system can liquidate you.
Just like people invest in a house and take equity out on it. Or they buy gold because they think it'll go up in value over time.
Regardless, you're being pedantic at this point. Back to the original discussion, there is utility to crypto now, and I've proven a way.
The point is that, unlike consumer loans, such loans require that the borrower has savings before they can take the loan. For example, most people who take a mortgage do so because they don't want to save money for 30 years before they can buy a house. They want to buy a house now, and save later. A mortgage loan allows them to do precisely that.
These other loans don't, and so they're less useful. They aren't completely useless. It's just that in most circumstances they aren't useful.
EXACTLY my point. If we actually turned lending and borrowing around so that you had to have collateral first (1), that could actually transform an entire economy, as well as people's minds away from spending what they don't have.
Credit card debt is at all time highs and they are raping people with high APY's on those funds.
(1) In SE Asia, they don't have the concept of credit reporting agencies and thus their 'credit cards' are all collateralized (what we refer to as debt cards). Living there is what turned me onto this concept and how it is a better way to do things. You can't spend more than what you've already deposited and you actually earn interest on it too!
My best guess is most bittorrent enthusiasts (and myself) would like to see a more natural solution to the decentralization problem. "Natural" being incentives which arise around sharing / not sharing and similar, vs straight up money incentives.
A reputation system could work but again, Sybil attacks could happen. So some how the network needs to figure out a way to make certain actions more expensive in the large.
IPFS might be a more modern alternative but it has similar issues. It's used for fairly small files such as books (libgen) but not really for movies.
Edit: Or do you man the torrent files only? That might work but they really are just links, it might be a bit overkill for them.
Downloading happened over usenet, but curation and discussion on a centralised website. The site got seized and the community moved to a new forum that runs on usenet itself.
Blockchain is overkill here - don't need a coin or stake or whatever
True, it worked really well for a while but lately it's been pretty terrible due to local copyright representatives suing major uploaders and others stopping because they just got old.
Also the notice & takedown has really killed usenet a bit. Private trackers are hard to get into just like with torrents.
The network of sharing software and movies is much older than the internet. Eventually you just purchase a preloaded data carrier from your local pot dealer. The drives are so large, the formula would go dramatically faster than BitTorrent. Shipping [say] 10 kg worth of data carriers is amazingly cheap.
Looking at some random portable drive 10 kg box / 0.265 kg = 37 drives and 37 * 5 TB = 185 TB ? Something like 100 000 to 400 000 hours of film. Good for a maximum fine in "lost revenue" of $ 1 000 000 000 000 for the single box.
There is a lengthy therapeutic treatment program between that stage and the torrent websites.
Eventually some bean counter will discover crowd sourcing Police Academy 8 and people will just give them money provided they desire to see it. Star citizen raised over $569 million. On the most profitable movies list nr 191 is Fifty Shades of Grey with $569 million from a budget of 40 million. I can see the problem, with crowd sourcing it would be like normal work. That extra 500 million would be unlikely. They would have to make 10 movies.
I once visited RarBG with uBlock Origin turned off by accident. The intensity of the shitstorm of fake links, transparent GIFs on top of the content and other stuff like that was overwhelming. I believe that it is universally stupid to trust torrent sites with anything.
This is also the problem with all distributed social networks. In the end, your options are formal centralization, and informal centralization, because absolutely nobody wants to live in true decentralization.
oh, some ppl do indeed want to.
thanks to encryption they can. but i agree that the likes of kazaa, edk and freenet are not for most ppl.
I see 100 (!) results for that movie's name. 49 of them have zero seeders at all. I don't know what even is the point. 29 of the results have one seeder. So already, 78% of the results are pure crap.
Let's look at the top result with 338 seeders: File is 3GB, H.264 video, 1080p, but with a crappy stereo AAC audio encoding... arrggh why??
Number 2 result with 84 seeders: 1.43GB, H.264 video, 720p, no word on the quality of the audio encoding. Even more worthless.
Number 3 result with 17 seeders: HEVC format, 2160p, audio streams include TrueHD Atmos 7.1, DTS-HD, Dolby Digital 5.1, stereo, and three non-English language streams. But, with an eye-watering download size of 61GB. Holy shit! Nice, but wow, what a download.
You have to go a few more down the list to find a good balance of high quality video and audio encoding, but with a reasonable file size. By that point you're in the single digit number of seeders.
Don't get me wrong, it's great to have a few choices and quality trade-offs. I guess there's someone out there who doesn't care about the stereo audio because they watch their movies with laptop speakers. But 100 results, with the vast majority of them either unseeded, poorly-seeded, or flawed in some way. I agree with OP: You definitely want some curation, not just search!
Because you are vastly overestimating how much most people actually notice or care about this.
0 seeders now doesn't mean forever. Some seeders only hook to the network once in a while, long enough for a few leechers to fetch it all. If the content is in demand enough then a few seeders may be left and suddenly a 0 seeder search result becomes an attractive one. Even curating is complicated for the human eye, so good luck automating that.
Sometimes disconnect from site seeder count is bigger, and say 1 seeder mentioned is actually 15. But that was never rarbg's case, it was reliable and dependable like no other similar service. It also had IMBD rating so I could quickly weed out not so great stuff and focus on well rated ones, it generated maybe 60-80 movies a day with my filter applied, so quite a stream. After 2 week vacation, catching up took some time.
I used to, including today, to just go there every day or two and check whats new with my predefined filter. Often great movies that I never heard about before, old and new alike, took 2 mins to get 1080p x265 variant. Glad I've still managed to download that highly rated turkish movie this morning.
Stereo doesn't imply low fidelity. Just as 7.1 Dolby Unobtainium doesn't imply high fidelity speakers.
But this couldn't be easier to game. All you have to do to be a seed is to report that you are a seed. You don't even have to send any data.
Here is straw man proposal, similar to cert chains and webs of trust: Say I'm a "curator". I say on HN/Reddit/Discord "here is my key hash 'p2pcuration:185da2bc59167692f596404fd83235f9bcb4e107b041f2e6e8d972da6dba00b7'". Any user that clicks the link or copies it into the search app adds the key to the trusted user list. With my private key I can sign torrents after I download them myself, which would mark the torrent as "good". When anyone who has added my key searches, the system searches for a corresponding signature from me as well. If a signature is found, the UI can chose to elevate that result.
The system could be extended so that signers could also sign other keys, expanding the trust network.
This system doesn't need to be run or maintained by each user. It could be served through a webui that can be run locally or shared with a small community. Migrating the interface to a new host would just require moving the config and keys.
Mastodon is big in Japan, and the reason why is uncomfortable ["child porn"]
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15053064
Mastodon and the challenges of abuse in a federated system
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17894684
How the biggest decentralized social network is dealing with its ["]Nazi["] problem
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20429465
Trump’s new social media platform found using Mastodon code
The problem then will be, how do you make sure your content is legit? There's no magic way here, the best thing you can do is compare the number of seeders and aim for the highest. If a torrent is fake, people will delete it and it won't be seeded. I have a thingy for that: https://sr.ht/~rakoo/magneticos/
The problem is, number of seeders naturally selects towards popular content. It doesn't ensure viability of content. But I don't think there's a technical answer to that.
Edit: found mentions of https://btdig.com and https://bt4g.org. I wasn't aware of the latter. A problem with the former is that it doesn't track number of peers.
DC++ is a bit more decentralized than BitTorrent. There still are central servers ("hubs"), but they don't even host any metadata. Search works by the hub broadcasting all search queries to all online peers and them replying with results if they have any. The file transfers themselves are p2p.
I have an idea that's kind of more decentralized. Initially envisioned as a missing global search feature for the fediverse, but can be adapter for anything that has a similar network structure. A server has a number of peers already established because of the ActivityPub federation. Each server would send to its peers some kind of bloom filter that determines the tags or keywords that this server has results for. Then, when searching, your server would find the peers who are likely to have what you want, and only send your search query to them. If there aren't any, then it would send your query to the peers that have most users (with some random bias for load balancing purposes) because they're likely to have more connectivity, and they would point you where to look based on their own peers and their bloom filters. There would also need to be some kind of reputation system (centralized server lists? p2p exchange of scores/reports?) so that servers that return spam or intentionally wrong results would get punished.
This could probably be made to work in a fully-decentralized p2p network, but I imagine it would be too easy to abuse. Getting a new domain costs money, yet getting a new IP or public key is free and easy.
For example, here is a personal DHT monitor where you can view what’s being announced on the DHT: https://github.com/retrohacker/taboo
Is there a main reason why there isn't (AFAIK, even though I haven't really researched) a distributed search that wouldn't have these problems? Is it a tech problem that literally can't be solved? Or it just hasn't been done? It seems like search is the obvious weak link, since the websites keep disappearing or taken down or blocked by governments and ISPs, etc.