[andreasvc]

It bugs me that it has to be in this stupid base64 encoded format, which is wasteful. Also, the binaries have to be cut up chunks of a certain size; it's all rather hacky. Instead of providing Usenet servers it would be better to offer something like bittorrent caches.

[manualz]

While lack of 8 bit support is unfortunate, most posts utilize yEnc now which is much more efficient than base64 or uuencode.

With bittorrent caches, wouldn't you still be limited to people providing seeds for each item? The sustainability of Usenet is now driven by commercial demand. Wouldn't BT be limited to people donating bandwidth/resources at personal will?

[andreasvc]

I meant replacing commercial usenet servers with commercial/ISP bittorrent caches. Perhaps paying for it would be harder to justify, but it could offer the guarantee of fast download speeds, plus never having to worry that there are 0 seeders. It's also interesting for ISPs because BT traffic costs them money if it has to go through other ISPs (peering agreements), whereas traffic through their cache would be essentially free.