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GitTorrent: A Decentralized GitHub

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Re: GitTorrent: A Decentralized GitHub

#111

Post by relate »

nilved wrote: post #51
cxxv wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your analogy doesn't hold up, as (for one) we have society and plants don't. I'm glad that child porn is illegal (which is usually distributed in files), as it makes the world safer for children. Also: some plants are serious jerks.

If pi goes on forever, it contains any and all representations of child porn that could exist. The first person to calculate pi that far will be breaking the law. No, that doesn't make sense, nor does any sort of information being illegal. What does make sense is to legislate the actions that can generate that data, or the misappropriation of that data.

You took a poor example since pi is not known to be a normal number (see eg http://mathworld.wolfram.com/NormalNumber.html )

This number however is:

    0.0 1 10 11 100 101 110 111 1000 ...
This number contains all movies that have and will ever exist. However to specify where a 700mb harry potter movie is in this number, you'll need at least 700mb to represent the index. So in some sense harry potter 'exists' in this number - but in another sense its just a silly encoding method.

Re: GitTorrent: A Decentralized GitHub

#112

Post by youvebeenbad »

rektide wrote: post #38

Lovely work! We ask for the commit we want and connect to a node with BitTorrent, but once connected we conduct this Smart Protocol negotiation in an overlay connection on top of the BitTorrent wire protocol, in what’s called a BitTorrent Extension. Then the remote node makes us a packfile and tells us the hash of that packfile, and then we start downloading that packfile from it and any other nodes who are seeding i…

I had no idea torrents had that limitation. Could torrents be tagged with versions and then old ones could be removed from seeders?

Re: GitTorrent: A Decentralized GitHub

#113

Post by ajkjk »

laumars wrote: post #109

I don't understand why so many people are in awe of this project when it seems to be based on a number of falsehoods: > "imagine someone arguing that we can do without BitTorrent because we have FTP. We would not advocate replacing BitTorrent with FTP, and the suggestion doesn’t even make sense! First — there’s no index of which hosts have which files in FTP, so we wouldn’t know where to look for anything." Actually…

I think your complaints are disingenuous. [edit: what I mean is that you've pointed out problems with small components of the overall article and used them as an argument against the article as a whole, which I think is unfair. I don't think the components' validity affects the overall idea.]

His argument may have some holes, and people are probably mostly ignorant of those holes so they can't critique them, but I don't think they're in awe of the idea because their awe hasn't been dispelled by identifying those holes.

This is a very neat idea, and none of the issues with the setup argument dispel that.

"using bittorrent for a protocol that's already distributed and already pretty saturated with github competitors; well it just seems redundant."

no, no, it doesn't seem redundant. DHT based distributed indexing is so incredibly fundamentally different than a mirror list for files in FTP or from a series of GitHub clones. It's owner-agnostic. It just exists, by virtue of having participants, with no overhead. I don't have to select a target host or find a server or even identify where my particular file (or git repository, or username, or whatever) lives. It's .. unification. It's elegant and reduces complexity and makes the whole ecosystem more simple.

Maybe I'm blinded by my own awe, but, I love this idea.

Also, yes, some people have thought of components of this before, but I haven't really seen the full stack laid out vertically like this, combined with a narrative that makes me so excited about it.

Re: GitTorrent: A Decentralized GitHub

#114

Post by ajkjk »

erikb wrote: post #99

Git itself is already distributed. Do we really need more distribution or do we simply need to learn to work more distributed?

It's clear, though, that there are aspects of 'distributed' that Git does not accomplish. This gives you a global namespace and a global identity, just like a website, without a single point of failure or a corporate interest, and with a closed source system and a trivial option for forking the whole structure into your own [friend group|company|private cluster|etc].

An argument could be made that git ought to be augmented with something like this: why run distributed protocol A on distributed protocol B; maybe we should just run distributed protocol AB from the get-go?

Re: GitTorrent: A Decentralized GitHub

#115

Post by TimJRobinson »

ChuckMcM wrote: post #95
rektide wrote: post #38

Lovely work! We ask for the commit we want and connect to a node with BitTorrent, but once connected we conduct this Smart Protocol negotiation in an overlay connection on top of the BitTorrent wire protocol, in what’s called a BitTorrent Extension. Then the remote node makes us a packfile and tells us the hash of that packfile, and then we start downloading that packfile from it and any other nodes who are seeding i…

I agree it is really stellar. The billion dollar concept for me though is encrypted repo torrents. Imagine a group of servers that are hosting encrypted chunks which form the basis of a homomorphic encryption protocol for distribution using forward error correction to allow recovery of the deltas if n of m components of that delta can be recovered. Basically if you have the key you can pull out of this amorphous clou…

I've always thought this would be amazing for file storage in general. A Dropbox that just syncs with the cloud encrypting your content with a private key and you can withdraw it at any time. You simply give back say 5 x as much storage as you use for the data mirroring.

Re: GitTorrent: A Decentralized GitHub

#116

Post by apetresc »

ChuckMcM wrote: post #95
rektide wrote: post #38

Lovely work! We ask for the commit we want and connect to a node with BitTorrent, but once connected we conduct this Smart Protocol negotiation in an overlay connection on top of the BitTorrent wire protocol, in what’s called a BitTorrent Extension. Then the remote node makes us a packfile and tells us the hash of that packfile, and then we start downloading that packfile from it and any other nodes who are seeding i…

I agree it is really stellar. The billion dollar concept for me though is encrypted repo torrents. Imagine a group of servers that are hosting encrypted chunks which form the basis of a homomorphic encryption protocol for distribution using forward error correction to allow recovery of the deltas if n of m components of that delta can be recovered. Basically if you have the key you can pull out of this amorphous clou…

How would that work? There's no homomorphic encryption schemes anywhere near general enough for that, as far as I know.

Re: GitTorrent: A Decentralized GitHub

#117

Post by leohutson »

jMyles wrote: post #4
cjbprime wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hi, author here. I have a mild bias against altcoins, and have heard bad things about Namecoin in particular: that the anti-spam incentives aren't good, leading to illegal files stored in the blockchain itself, and that there's no compact representation (like Bitcoin's Simplified Payment Verification) for determining whether a claimed name is valid without consulting a full history. As I understand it, these two desi…

The notion that a file can be illegal makes as much sense to the internet as a plant being illegal makes to the earth. Especially when it has the side effect of inhibiting what otherwise might be a compelling solution.

Right, and the notion that murder is illegal makes no sense to the universe as humans are "merely" an aggregate of matter no different than any other. Nothing makes any sense to entities not capable of reasoning, that is a pointless tautology with no relevance to the discussion.

Re: GitTorrent: A Decentralized GitHub

#119

Post by brasky »

TimJRobinson wrote: post #115
ChuckMcM wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree it is really stellar. The billion dollar concept for me though is encrypted repo torrents. Imagine a group of servers that are hosting encrypted chunks which form the basis of a homomorphic encryption protocol for distribution using forward error correction to allow recovery of the deltas if n of m components of that delta can be recovered. Basically if you have the key you can pull out of this amorphous clou…

I've always thought this would be amazing for file storage in general. A Dropbox that just syncs with the cloud encrypting your content with a private key and you can withdraw it at any time. You simply give back say 5 x as much storage as you use for the data mirroring.

Like http://storj.io/ ? I think they have a lot of code to write though.

Re: GitTorrent: A Decentralized GitHub

#120

Post by sukilot »

apetresc wrote: post #116
ChuckMcM wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree it is really stellar. The billion dollar concept for me though is encrypted repo torrents. Imagine a group of servers that are hosting encrypted chunks which form the basis of a homomorphic encryption protocol for distribution using forward error correction to allow recovery of the deltas if n of m components of that delta can be recovered. Basically if you have the key you can pull out of this amorphous clou…

How would that work? There's no homomorphic encryption schemes anywhere near general enough for that, as far as I know.

That's why it's a fun problem.
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