[wyager]

Honestly, I think the pirate bay getting busted would be a good thing, as it would probably lead to the creation of more distributed, robust filesharing platforms.

The actual bulk data distribution is already quite P2P; the only remaining centralized part is the part that distributes the magnet hashes.

[aaren]

Could a way around the centralisation be to encode the magnet hash database (like btdigg) as metadata in the distributed hash table? Then we just need a seed to get at this somehow, which could be spread around forums. Offload searching of the database onto clients.

Talking in vague terms because I'm stretching beyond my knowledge here.

btdigg: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BTDigg

[icebraining]

Haven't read the technical details, but http://www.tribler.org/ already offers decentralized torrent search.

[Raphael]

Gnutella has p2p search.

[runn1ng]

Fully decentralized P2P networks are probably older than bittorrent (Gnutella, eMule, and their similar clones).

The fact is people don't want 100% decentralized P2P network; people want the fakes and the viruses removed and so on.

[murbard2]

Sure, then just have trusted third parties (such as TPB) sign the torrents. It would be pretty hard to shutdown someone signing hashes from an unknown location.

[runn1ng]

In a fully decentralized environment, you would need to somehow know who to trust and make some karma/feedback in a decentralized way.

Given that PGP's web of trust never really caught on, I am not sure if this would work.

But maybe it would and I am just too pesimistic.

[murbard2]

Decentralization is a tool, not a goal. TBP, and some verified uploaders managed to gain a good reputation and they didn't abuse it, did they?

[dandelion_lover]

Why not just use I2P? Though it is not so fast, but for many things acceptable.

[minthd]

The pirate bay has a comment system, and an option to verify torrents are uploaded by someone. It's possible to implement those in a p2p way, but than it comes close to the improved systems on silk road with reputation ,etc - so maybe they prefer not to go there.

[Joona]

I'm pretty sure you can actually download the magnet links as an archive, which shouldn't be too big either.

[dfc]

You can download "an archive" that has all of the magnet links at the time of the creation of the archive. This is not helpful for finding new content. Most importantly downloading a 9 gig archive of magnet links is not a workable system for average users; Bittorrent is only as good as the number of peers in the swarm.

[runn1ng]

I actually made a magnet link archive a year and something back ( http://www.karelbilek.com/piratebay/ ), mostly as an experiment

Only the magnets and names - 76 MB; all the magnets + descriptions + comments - 631 MB

It's not that workable for any particular usage (other then statistics I guess) and I never upgraded it since then. There were some attempts by other people to regularly archive TPB (and semi-mirror sites like torrentz.eu and bitsnoop were "mirroring it" by reposting its torrents until the very end) but I am not sure if somebody actually dumped it online regularly in an archive

[elros]

I don't think it's intended as the main mean of consumption, just as yet another measure to make sure it's hard to destroy the information.

[Joona]

True, and I would love to see a solution to it, but downloading an archive makes it at least a little bit less centralized.

[draugadrotten]

Could the magnet links be distributed by adding them to dummy transactions using the BitCoin "coinbase" blockchain method?

[Cakez0r]

Curious about this too.

[toomuchtodo]

Could the magnet links be served as a torrent?

[Joona]

(If I understand your question correctly,) sure, but it would instantly be outdated, because you can't include the torrent you just created.

[forgotpasswd3x]

Possible a magnet to the magnet bundle?

[aaren]

yes, but because the magnet link is a hash of the content it is only ever a snapshot of the magnet bundle.

[toomuchtodo]

So version the magnet link (similar to git) and always serve the latest magnet link via a DNS TXT record.

[aaren]

where does the version control repo live?