[joshstrange]

>This is pretty much exactly how binary newsgroups got started.

Yeah minus the encryption (well that's not 100% true as you could post encrypted files and people do but it's less of a part of the "protocol" than it is in this example). The beauty of newsgroups is they are replicated to other NNTP servers. Distributed file stores fascinate me (I know this reddit protocol is not distributed or rather it's wholly owned by 1 entity even if the data is distributed across datacenters) and I'm very excited to see where things like IPFS [0], freenet [1], internet2 [2], etc turn out.

[0] http://ipfs.io/

[1] https://freenetproject.org/

[2] http://p2p.internet2.edu/