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Show HN: Web3Torrent – Adding Ethereum Micropayments to WebTorrent

blog.statechannels.org

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Re: Show HN: Web3Torrent – Adding Ethereum Micropayments to WebTorrent

#41

Post by monokh »

vageli wrote: post #29
sudosysgen wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you got paid for torrenting, a lot less people would torrent because of the much increased legal liability and massive increase in lawsuits.

As someone with no knowledge on the subject, why would accepting payment increase liability? As in, the target of the lawsuit would also be liable for the money they received, or something else?

It's probably worth noting the horrible privacy characteristics of Ethereum. With the right resources, It's straightforward to track down the identity behind the seeders.

Re: Show HN: Web3Torrent – Adding Ethereum Micropayments to WebTorrent

#42

Post by z3t4 »

yoavm wrote: post #6

"Torrenting has an incentivization problem. There is sometimes a real lack of incentive to seed a file, especially for obscure files where you may only find a single digit number of people that have it. Adding monetary incentives to the existing torrenting structure should prove to be extremely interesting." In my opinion, if torrenting meant one needs to pay for download, we would never have heard about torrents. Th…

Could replace sites like Mega uoload...

Re: Show HN: Web3Torrent – Adding Ethereum Micropayments to WebTorrent

#43

Post by Sargos »

monokh wrote: post #41
vageli wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone with no knowledge on the subject, why would accepting payment increase liability? As in, the target of the lawsuit would also be liable for the money they received, or something else?

It's probably worth noting the horrible privacy characteristics of Ethereum. With the right resources, It's straightforward to track down the identity behind the seeders.

Yeah, this will probably be integrated with AZTEC or some kind of zk scheme before it becomes a full mainnet protocol due to the risky nature of torrents.

Re: Show HN: Web3Torrent – Adding Ethereum Micropayments to WebTorrent

#44

Post by teknopurge »

mratsim wrote: post #10
yoavm wrote: post #6

"Torrenting has an incentivization problem. There is sometimes a real lack of incentive to seed a file, especially for obscure files where you may only find a single digit number of people that have it. Adding monetary incentives to the existing torrenting structure should prove to be extremely interesting." In my opinion, if torrenting meant one needs to pay for download, we would never have heard about torrents. Th…

This has implications way beyond torrenting. This solves the incentivization of bandwidth in a decentralized way. If we now solve the closely related incentivization of long-term encrypted storage, we would be able to build a sustainable decentralized storage service unlike torrents that are powered by fame or Infura which is powered by corporate philanthropy (which never lasts unless we become the product). This mea…

storj.io already does this.

Re: Show HN: Web3Torrent – Adding Ethereum Micropayments to WebTorrent

#45

Post by homakov »

I can routinely download any torrent in the world on top speed... What problem does it solve?

Torrents, as a poor choice for the "killer app", aside, state channels are a curious technology but most traditional implementations [fully pre-collateralized channels] have a design flaw where no one wants to put money to the end user, while happily accepting inward capacity from the senders. Haven't looked into this specific implementation, i wonder if it has a fix for this. "Virtual channels" sound relevant here.

Re: Show HN: Web3Torrent – Adding Ethereum Micropayments to WebTorrent

#46

Post by homakov »

derefr wrote: post #34
michaelmrose wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How about distributed YouTube with micropayments instead of ads.

https://about.d.tube/ , https://joinpeertube.org/ , https://lbry.com/ , https://verasity.io/ , https://livepeer.org/ . Everybody's doing it. Not clear if anybody cares.

narrator voice: no one cares

Re: Show HN: Web3Torrent – Adding Ethereum Micropayments to WebTorrent

#47

Post by homakov »

tmcls wrote: post #5
random_kris wrote: post #2

Could this be ported to bitcoin lightning ?

[Member of the statechannels.org team here.] Not directly. State channels are similar to lightning, but there's a key difference: * in lightning each payment is routed through the network independently, requiring participation from the intermediary nodes * in a state channel the intermediary nodes are used to establish a channel and then the payments are direct The upshot is that in state channels, once the connectio…

What happened to traditional definition of state channels?

It used to be just like payment channels, but with a bigger scope and more fancy state operations.

The trick with avoiding multiparties was called "virtual state channels" or something like that. When did it change?

Re: Show HN: Web3Torrent – Adding Ethereum Micropayments to WebTorrent

#48

Post by imhoguy »

homakov wrote: post #45

I can routinely download any torrent in the world on top speed... What problem does it solve? Torrents, as a poor choice for the "killer app", aside, state channels are a curious technology but most traditional implementations [fully pre-collateralized channels] have a design flaw where no one wants to put money to the end user, while happily accepting inward capacity from the senders. Haven't looked into this specif…

Can you? What about these countless "0 seeders" rare materials which never start or stop forever at 90% mark?

Re: Show HN: Web3Torrent – Adding Ethereum Micropayments to WebTorrent

#49

Post by duxup »

patrickaljord wrote: post #21
yoavm wrote: post #6

"Torrenting has an incentivization problem. There is sometimes a real lack of incentive to seed a file, especially for obscure files where you may only find a single digit number of people that have it. Adding monetary incentives to the existing torrenting structure should prove to be extremely interesting." In my opinion, if torrenting meant one needs to pay for download, we would never have heard about torrents. Th…

I beg to differ. I used to have a Netflix subscription here in France (not anymore), my wife is from Latin America and wanted to use English subtitles instead of French ones (and so did I), funny thing is, English subtitles were not available in France, the only way to get English subtitles was to use a proxy and a US Netflix account (not possible anymore as many proxies are blocked) or just use torrent. There are ma…

I always wondered why I see such limited options for subtitles sometimes. Some of it I'm sure has to have more options but Netflix only offers a couple...

Re: Show HN: Web3Torrent – Adding Ethereum Micropayments to WebTorrent

#50

Post by homakov »

imhoguy wrote: post #48
homakov wrote: post #45

I can routinely download any torrent in the world on top speed... What problem does it solve? Torrents, as a poor choice for the "killer app", aside, state channels are a curious technology but most traditional implementations [fully pre-collateralized channels] have a design flaw where no one wants to put money to the end user, while happily accepting inward capacity from the senders. Haven't looked into this specif…

Can you? What about these countless "0 seeders" rare materials which never start or stop forever at 90% mark?

Didn't experience this problem much.

If not found on any tracker, such a material is probably too rare for anyone to care about. Even with some monetization model in place, it would be unrealistic to keep all sorts of "rare" materials in the world to make $1 from a random stranger coming once a year.

Anyway, I would't pay $1

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