Mar 11, 2018, 08:06 am
There was a short debate some time ago about how thepiratebay (due to its success) was blocking the development of a "new torrent tech", and how the best thing to happen was piratebay to cease existing, so that new tech could emerge.
The debate was short because no one showed any clue about how that new tech should work, other than some vague notions about being "impossible to shut down".
The problem was focused in the centralized nature of torrent sites. If the site is shutted down, like kickasstorrents was, everything is lost. People need to go to another site and start all over again, and what if there're no sites left? Scary.
So what about a decentralized system? That would be awesome, if a node stops working, it doesn't matter, 'cos it's multinodal, brilliant.
But the problem is that torrent systems are necessarily centralized, because their center consists on the hierarchical structure of people that make it work: admins and mods. These people are the ones who do the job: they delete the bad torrents. Without mods deleting malware and fakes, a torrent site is worthless.
In a decentralized system there would not be mods, only peers, and peers can not moderate themselves, because people uploading malware are peers too, it's that simple. "Peers flagging bad torrents" is just an idiotic idea. It would be abused to the point of making the system useless in no time.
So that "new tech" is just an entelechy.
And blockchain doesn't solve the problem, it has nothing to do with it. The problem is what torrent are added to the database, not the nature of the database itself. And only mods can do that selection.
The debate was short because no one showed any clue about how that new tech should work, other than some vague notions about being "impossible to shut down".
The problem was focused in the centralized nature of torrent sites. If the site is shutted down, like kickasstorrents was, everything is lost. People need to go to another site and start all over again, and what if there're no sites left? Scary.
So what about a decentralized system? That would be awesome, if a node stops working, it doesn't matter, 'cos it's multinodal, brilliant.
But the problem is that torrent systems are necessarily centralized, because their center consists on the hierarchical structure of people that make it work: admins and mods. These people are the ones who do the job: they delete the bad torrents. Without mods deleting malware and fakes, a torrent site is worthless.
In a decentralized system there would not be mods, only peers, and peers can not moderate themselves, because people uploading malware are peers too, it's that simple. "Peers flagging bad torrents" is just an idiotic idea. It would be abused to the point of making the system useless in no time.
So that "new tech" is just an entelechy.
And blockchain doesn't solve the problem, it has nothing to do with it. The problem is what torrent are added to the database, not the nature of the database itself. And only mods can do that selection.