[MatthewRayfield]

I couldn't find it with a quick search, but I remember many years ago someone creating a similar scheme for storing files inside of TinyURLs.

You would run the uploader and get back a list of TinyURLs that could then be used to retrieve the files later with a downloader.

But you couldn't store too much in each URL so the resulting list could be pretty big.

[klyrs]

This is a favorite lunch topic at work. AFAIK we stumbled on the idea ourselves, but I'm not surprised to hear it's unoriginal. Rather than a list, our design is a tree structure where leaf nodes contain data and branch nodes contain lists of tinyurls...

[abricot]

Someone also created a filesystem using DNS caches of others to store the files: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16134041