Show HN: Web3Torrent – Adding Ethereum Micropayments to WebTorrent • Hacker News Board

Not really because it’s tightly coupled with Ethereum smart contracts. It looks like it was built on top of WebTorrent App (webtorrent.io). Web3Torrent is currently live on the Göerli testnet.

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

#5

Post by tmcls » Mon, Jun 22, 2020, 4:53 PM UTC

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 connection is established, the payments are truly peer-to-peer, and don't need any interaction with a third party.

We use this property in Web3Torrent, as the payments are sent directly peer-to-peer on top of the webtorrent messaging layer. This wouldn't be possible with lightning, though you could probably find another way to accomplish something similar.

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

#6

Post by yoavm » Mon, Jun 22, 2020, 5:00 PM UTC

"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. This might give people more incentive to seed, but I'd never use it for what I use torrents - get stuff for free or reduce the load of FOSS servers.

To me it's the usual crypto thing - very cool from a technological perspective, not useful in real life.

edit: typos

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

#7

Post by xiphias2 » Mon, Jun 22, 2020, 5:02 PM UTC

random_kris wrote: post #2

Could this be ported to bitcoin lightning ?

There's no reason why it couldn't be implemented. At some point I'm sure it will be, as these kinds of protocols are needed for decentralized data sharing in the future.

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

#8

Post by reidjs » Mon, Jun 22, 2020, 5:03 PM UTC

I like this approach to incentivize seeding, this could create a boom in torrenting if it works decently well and enough people hop on board. Too bad this is only running on test net, understandably.

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

#9

Post by xiphias2 » Mon, Jun 22, 2020, 5:09 PM UTC

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…

People are already paying for downloading seeded torrents, they are just hidden behind private trackers, as the public torrent selection is quite small.

I'm also paying for youtube premium, at the same time the people I'm listening to have to be careful not to say ,,COVID-19'', because their revenue would drop to 0, even though it was the main meme of the last few months. I would happily pay them through lightning network instead.

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

#10

Post by mratsim » Mon, Jun 22, 2020, 5:15 PM UTC

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 means that we would be able to replicate backup/archive services like BackBlaze or Amazon Glacier or even ensure the longevity of archive.org.