[yoavm]

"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

[patrickaljord]

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 many services that streaming companies refuse to offer even to paying customers. Now you may say "streaming companies depend on hollywood licensing per country", sure, but this case also happened on Netflix produced shows...

[sudosysgen]

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

[vageli]

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?

[sudosysgen]

Most countries have much different penalties for piracy and selling pirated goods.

For example, in Canada, the penalty for non-commercial infringement is generally about 100$, and it can go up to 5000$ maximum (repeat offenders and so on). For commercial infringement, the penalty is of 20 000$.

Furthermore, in Canada, seeding downloaded files via P2P service is of ambiguous legality, with some interpretations saying that as long as you don't advertise or try to share it with as much people as possible (positive action) required to make it illegal. Receiving payment for this would torpedo that defense, which means even higher liability. All in all, it's not a good idea.

[monokh]

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.

[Sargos]

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.

[joosters]

Double criminality! If you are having to launder your micropayment income, you probably should start to question your morals...

[Acrobatic_Road]

This uses state channels for payment which is more secretive than using regular ethereum transactions. To take the cake, the funds can be mixed on tornado.cash or AZTEC or whatever the latest ETH privacy tech is.

[LockAndLol]

There are anonymous torrents thanks to I2P. If those were to become more popular, then it might be more interesting to embed payments there.

[imhoguy]

There is low chance to find a peer in I2P for some already niche material. Tor with clearnet exit nodes is better although still less peers due to NAT.

[LockAndLol]

Bittorrent over Tor isn't a good idea

https://blog.torproject.org/bittorrent-over-tor-isnt-good-id...

[duxup]

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...

[VWWHFSfQ]

I always wonder how normal, presumably honest, people go from "I can't watch my shows with the subtitles that I like" to "I'll just steal it."

[patrickaljord]

Oh but I was still paying for my netflix subscription at the time. So technically I was just stealing the subtitles license. When I did cut my Netflix subscription, I also stopped watching shows even on torrent, haven't watched a show since 2016 when I had my kids. Youtube, twitter, facebook and now tiktok offer free alternatives and are more entertaining in my opinion. Not to mention the heavy political agenda Netflix has been pushing on their shows lately, already get enough of that on social media, no need to also get it on my show when just looking for entertainment.

[Findeton]

Because we don't agree with copyright laws. When you steal something in the physical world, you are depriving someone of the stolen object. In the digital world that doesn't happen, you are just producing yet another copy. For this reason I can't agree with these laws where the government is giving someone/a company a monopoly on ideas or digital things, it's creating scarcity artificially. Patent and copyright laws should not exist.

[VWWHFSfQ]

sounds like some gymnastics

[mratsim]

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.

[abecedarius]

Fun history: Bram Cohen quit Mojo Nation to make BitTorrent. Mojo Nation aimed to solve exactly the problems you're talking about. It was too ambitious for its time, apparently, but trying is how you find out.

[michaelmrose]

How about distributed YouTube with micropayments instead of ads.

[derefr]

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.

[teknopurge]

storj.io already does this.

[cchance]

Sia, MaidSafe, Storj, Filecoin, a number of networks either out or on the way for this kind of storage, theirs another one too but I can't remember the name of it for the life of me and I was a node a year or 2 ago for them lol.

[xiphias2]

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.

[slg]

People pay for private trackers? Every private tracker I have heard of is free to use. They handle the seeding motivation problem by having rules in place that require whatever level of seeding they feel is best for the community of the tracker. If you break those rules, you are kicked out. That seems to work fine without the need for micropayments.

[heavyset_go]

Of the private trackers that I know of, only the ones that solicited donations were raided and taken down. I am unaware of any explicitly paid private trackers, and such a business model seems like a great way to conjure the ire of the FBI.

[namibj]

They instead require seeding performance/behaviour that almost necessitates renting a seedbox.

[londons_explore]

I don't understand the sites that require a > 1.0 seed ratio... Like it's mathematically impossible for everyone to seed to > 1.0

[keyserzose]

It's possible because of freeleech downloads or finding the files elsewhere and seeding them, but > 1 ratio is very strict indeed.

[gpm]

This doesn't seem to pay creators though, it pays people who have bandwidth to seed (redistribute) their streams instead.

[nybble41]

It's paying the people actually doing the work required at the time (the distribution of works which are already public). If creators want to get paid they need to arrange for that before making the work public, not after. There are plenty of perfectly viable options for ensuring that creators get compensated for their work. Copyright just isn't one of them.

[rytill]

> the people I'm listening to have to be careful not to say ,,COVID-19'', because their revenue would drop to 0

I don't understand what you meant by this. As in, everyone's tired of hearing about it?

[slg]

Early on in the pandemic, Youtube was demonetizing videos related to COVID-19 as they do for numerous other sensitive topics like war, death, or terrorist attacks. Many Youtubers would therefore be cautious even mentioning it tangentially to prevent that potential demonetization. I think it has been months since Youtube adjusted their policy on this to allow monetization (EDIT: Yep, this policy was changed over 3 months ago[1]).

[1] - https://techcrunch.com/2020/03/11/youtube-will-now-allow-cre...

[derefr]

Consider that private torrent networks are already essentially "pay to download" — in that you are able to download from them by maintaining an upload ratio, and you maintain an upload ratio either by renting a cloud seedbox, donating to the network itself, or paying for your own electricity+bandwidth to host your own seedboxes. And yet such networks are manifold.

I'd love something that took the incentive system that makes private torrent networks work, and made it possible to have that incentive system "accessible to the public" without destroying it. Then maybe I could finally get access to the collections that contain those weird old movies I watched once but almost nobody's ever heard of.

[dalore]

You would only have to pay if you download more then you consume. If you contribute back to the network, equal resources you used then it is still "free".

[crispyporkbites]

But you don't have to pay - you have to seed. Anyone can start seeding and selling their bandwidth back to the network.

This means that people who can't afford the content but do have a network connection actually can obtain it and contribute to the network.

[ActsJuvenile]

Furthermore, downloading the Ethereum Blockchain, going through shady exchanges to buy ether coins, and maintaining a secure wallet is a much bigger headache than simply paying for Amazon Prime.

This is a nice tech demo but not of any practical significance.

[crispyporkbites]

That’s like someone in the 90s saying paying for an internet connection, getting an email address and signing up for YouTube is too much of a headache than turning on the TV.

Besides, you can earn currency from just seeding the torrent- presumably there would be a way to download some initial torrents for free and then you can contribute to the network directly without needing to get a wallet or set anything up.

It’s on the web as well, so it could be as seamless as YouTube, only you’d have a small currency counter that goes up if you leave the tab open, and you can either spend that currency by downloading or withdraw it by selling it to other users who would rather pay than seed.

[joosters]

Cryptocurrency doesn’t look good when it is inevitably compared with the early days of the web. The internet got rapidly better each year, whereas crypto has been around for years without any real improvements, in usability, safety, or efficiency.

[Sargos]

I don't know what you mean. Maybe you just don't pay attention?

A few years ago transactions were limited to 15 transactions per second, today there are multiple ways to achieve thousands of transactions per second[1]. A few years ago privacy didn't exist and now there are multiple ways to achieve privacy [2][3]. A few years ago end users had to remember long complicated strings to send a transfer or to restore their wallets and now there are easy ways to transfer to human readable names [4] and social wallet recovery [5] if you lose your funds or make a mistake. Argent alone is a huge increase in usability for end users.

There are more but if you even look at these metrics then things are improving at a great clip. Faster than the early web even.

[1] https://medium.com/matter-labs/evaluating-ethereum-l2-scalin... [2] https://tornado.cash/ [3] https://www.aztecprotocol.com/ [4] https://ens.domains/ [5] https://www.argent.xyz/

[CyberDildonics]

If torrent required payments when they first existed, probably not. At the moment, people do pay for servers to seed torrents so that they have a positive ratio on private trackers.

Torrents don't run on altruism and they never did. You might be looking at one side of the equation, but what if you could earn cryptocurrency by using extra bandwidth on servers by seeding torrents? What if you could pay for a VPN or private server that has plenty of extra bandwidth? What if you could find something rare much easier or get it much faster?

[aussieguy1234]

I would be willing to pay a nominal fee to get faster, more reliable torrents. I already pay for a torrent caching service to get better download speeds.

[ed25519FUUU]

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

Indeed, the vast bulk of crypto technologies appear to be solutions out in search of problems.

[CyberDildonics]

If you have no problems to solve I'm sure it can seem like that. If your country has international currency controls and you need to get your hands on money that isn't going to inflate away in a few weeks, then a decentralized currency that works well would look a lot more valuable.

[z3t4]

Could replace sites like Mega uoload...