Ask HN: Why is there no P2P streaming protocol like BitTorrent?

If that's your thing. And you have some sort of presence online elsewhere, then you can link to peertube, no matter which, or selfhosted, without problem.

That's why I pointed you to it. If you need/want the most massive audience, because of platform familarity/network effect, then probably not. At least not now. But someone has to start somehow :)

one issue I can imagine would be that each part would discover peers independently where assumption that most peers of previous parts should be expected to also have those files.

second idea would be to use ipfs in that way instead of torrent. that would probably have much easier time for reusing peer discovery between parts and also would solve issue when to stop seeding as this is already build in into protocol.

I guess that creating distributed twitch basing on ipfs would be feasible but not sure how many people would like to install ipfs node before that could use that. that's kind of chicken and egg problem, you need a lot of people before this system starts work really well, but to get interest it need to really perform well so people would migrate from twitch like services.

ofc you can use public gateways. afaik cloudflare have public ipfs endpoint that could serve as fallback

There are other genuinely useful crypto projects (like Monero for privacy and I don't like the idea of smart contracts)

I really want to tell you the fact that most crypto is scam. These guys first went into crypto and now I am seeing so much crypto + AI.

As someone who genuinely is interested in crypto from a technology (decentralization perspective)

I see transactions as a byproduct not the end result & I see people wanting to earn a quick buck feel really weird.

Also crypto isn't safe. I just think like now its better to correlate as a tech stock though 99% of the time, its run by scams, so absolutely worse.

The technology is still fascinating. But just because the technology is fascinating doesn't mean its valuable. Many people are overselling their stuff.

That being said, I have actually managed to use crypto to create a permanent storage (something like ipfs but its forced to store it forever) , so I think this can be used where anonymity/decentralized is required. But still, this thing could be done without including money in the process as well & crypto is still not as decentralized as one might imagine.

Orchestrating p2p realtime video distribution is going to have a lot of problems, and spend VC money until someone acquires you is just a lot easier.

Here's a small list of challenges you'd face:

You'll need to have a pretty good distribution network to handle users who just can't manage to p2p connect.

Figuring out the right amount of user's bandwidth you can use without people getting upset; there's a lot of internet accounts with bandwidth quotas, especially for mobile

Trying to arrange so that users connect to users with the least transmission delays would be needed to reduce overall latency. Between cross oceanic connections having unavoidable latency, the potential of buffer bloat, and having a reasonable jitter buffer, pretty soon you have wild delays and potential rebuffering.

Bandwidth constraints / layer switching is going to be a big challenge; it's one thing when your server can just push the best stream the client can manage, but if you're streaming from a peer and the stream is too big, the peer probably doesn't have a smaller stream to switch to and there's no good way to know if where the bandwidth constraint is ... maybe you should switch to the same stream from someone else or maybe you should switch to a smaller stream. Can you get even packets from one peer and odd packets from another ... should you?