Hacker News Reader

Comment by Torgo | Hacker News Reader

I would really rather read technical details about how this works. I looked into the mutable torrent specification (that lets you make changes to a torrent) as a way to create a bittorrent "hosted" blog, but mutable torrents ultimately need a feed hosted by an http server, which destroys the decentralization. I am not on Windows, I cannot try this out if it's currently Windows-only.

View on HN

Regardless of which way you look at decentralization, there has to be an origin, and due to the nature of these networks, enough active peers that "cache" the content. By having a hosted http feed for at least a small percentage of the time you guarantee the network at least 1 active peer.

Personally I can see decentralization becoming a much bigger thing - I don't want to get into the politics of the likes of China, or domestic net neutrality. But these will drive the smartest minds to create a decentralized self maintaining network - think bitcoin.

Forgive my ignorance, but could you not use the same concept as the blockchain?

Not really. The blockchain is meant to work for transaction type of information, not documents. It also keeps all of the transactions ever made. This type of web would probably contain a lot more information than that. Therefore you wouldn't want every peer with a copy of the whole web.

The case where this is relevant is in decentralized source control. The only project I know of that set out to tackle this is dead in the water:

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/612530753/gitchain/post...

That probably actually would be possible by emitting a negligible transaction from an address under one's control that has the SHA1 sum of the torrent encoded inside the OP_RETURN. This would be sufficient to construct a bittorrent magnet link to download the post/data/whatever. The bitcoin address itself would act as the feed. This doesn't rely solely on bittorrent, but nevertheless that does seem like a workable, decentralized solution for publishing a bittorrent feed. Bitcoin solves another problem, thanks!

Another neat side-effect of using a bitcoin address like that is that people could make donations to you through it :-)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com