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Comment by kumarvvr | Hacker News Reader

Bit-torrent was a failure in my opinion.

I really wish there was a client / protocol that allowed for sharing of files, but remove control from the user for what to share. Also limit the bandwidth on a monthly basis.

Sort of like a global peer-to-peer cloud. It could be used by open source organizations for sharing software and allow everyone to contribute to open source indirectly.

Users can designate a fixed size and bandwidth. Then whenever they use their computers, torrents will be running in the background.

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There's Freenet[1], but I don't think that ever got adoption to the level of bittorrent. But they have different goals and different uses. Bittorrent isn't intended to be a way to disrupt censorship; it's a way to distribute data at lower cost if some downloaders are willing to also upload, and there's some amount of reliability benefit as well in that a disappearing source can potentially be replaced by peers who got partial downloads, and it's successful at that.

If we didn't tend to have 100:1 download:upload ratios on our residential connections, it could have revolutionized more things, but it's effective in certain communities and has business applications too.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freenet

This is how the technology from which Bram derived the core of the BitTorrent architecture (MojoNation, where he worked prior to releasing BitTorrent) worked, and it was a failure. When storage is abstracted away from the publisher in this manner it gets flooded with content that is so nasty no one wants to host it themselves (child porn, etc), when the bandwidth and storage accounting is split from the specific content being shared you end up with a lot more people trying to game the system because credit earned from one node or piece of content can be used for something you really want, and when you have a global cloud of p2p nodes the power is concentrated in the search engine necessary to find content and you end up even more centralized than the web is today.

Been there. Done that. It doesn't end up working out the way you think it should.

Why would I want to relinquish control from what I share? Sounds like a liability nightmare.

Not in most western countries. It would be no different than running Tor nodes.

Bittorrent is more of a liability nightmare since it's super hard to block on a public network yet easy to record what IPs download certain torrents.

Running tor exit nodes is a legal liability in many western countries already, so "it's only as risky as tor" is small consolation. You might not get convicted ultimately but the process of explaining why your IP showed up on the access logs of the child porn site they just raided is a problematic enough prospect to scare most people off running an exit node

This has a lot of issues for the user:

• their disk space is now taken up by arbitrary files they don't want and can't delete.

• some (if not a vast majority) of these files will be child pornography.

There would be benefits too though. CDNs would be marginally less useful lol.

That's exactly how the Japanese filesharing scene developed - there's 3 proprietary programs that do just that (Winny, Share, Perfect Dark). Torrents aren't that popular there, and Japanese content torrent uploads aren't usually done by Japanese people.

https://freenetproject.org/index.html

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