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by filiwickers 3183 days ago
Ah cool! I hadn't seen quilt before. You are spot on with the differences.

Dat is targeting similar users to Quilt. But we are also looking more broadly at libraries, labs, or other larger academic/gov't organizations managing data. There are a lot of data publishing tools in the sciences such as Zenodo. We'd love for it to be easier to download/publish data to those places. Dat is decentralized, so it really fits well in integrating other data tools.

You can use Dat to replace file transfer software like rsync, so it is a bit more general purpose.

Another difference not mentioned is that Dat really starts at the protocol level while Quilt is more software-focused. Dat protocol is a peer-to-peer protocol for syncing files, modeled off Git and BitTorrent. We built the data management software on top of the protocol.

Edit: I should mention we don't offer any hosting right now, all the data up there is temporarily cached. There is public hosting via Hashbase[1] from the Beaker team. The cool part about Dat being p2p is that it's really easy to switch hosts or use multiple hosts.

[1] https://hashbase.io/
1 comments
zitterbewegung 3183 days ago
If I uploaded a bunch of data that was obtained illegally there is nothing stopping me from doing that right?

Also, is your peer to peer network able to be attacked by nefarious users like a sybil attack? Is there a situation where I could alter or forge data?

link
filiwickers 3182 days ago
> If I uploaded a bunch of data that was obtained illegally there is nothing stopping me from doing that right?

The hosting provider is responsible for removing illegal content. Dat itself doesn't track any content. The datproject.org is more of a registry, not a host.

> Also, is your peer to peer network able to be attacked by nefarious users like a sybil attack? Is there a situation where I could alter or forge data?

No, only authorized people can write to each dat key (currently only the owner, but multi-writer is coming soon). All the writes are signed with the writers private key and then verified whenever content is downloaded.

link