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Topic: Using the blockchain as a tracker + BitTorrent for Silk Road seller pages (Read 1785 times)

legendary
Activity: 1232
Merit: 1076
hero member
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Merit: 500
Martijn Meijering
Is this a different proposal than this thread started by FrostWire's lead developer?

Bitcoin + BitTorrent integration discussion.

If not, then we should probably move the discussion there.
hero member
Activity: 714
Merit: 500
Martijn Meijering
the existing dht is a distributed hash table for lookups of hash data.

I know, but in what way is storing this information in the blockchain superior? Or do you want to store a mapping from keywords to hashes of a torrent file inside the blockchain? So, user queries DB containing data extracted from the blockchain for keywords, user uses resulting torrent hashes to retrieve torrent files from DHT, user looks up hashes of the individual pieces of the desired content in the torrent file, queries DHT again to get IP and port number of peers offering this piece and thenstarts downloading?
legendary
Activity: 1232
Merit: 1076
Mike Hearn has something similar but not using a DHT (yet): https://github.com/mikehearn/PayFile

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r0BXnWlnIi4
video is pretty cool. people see it for rewarding content creators but I much more different possibilities in this stuff.
staff
Activity: 4284
Merit: 8808
The basic idea is to embed searchable hashes in the blockchain that can't be censored.
The block chain is not a jamming resistant channel, which makes these kinds of ideas a little foolish (see also the evoting people with the same notions).
member
Activity: 81
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Interesting thing. What will government do if you embed a child porn in the blockchain? Will they ban bitcoin miners?
legendary
Activity: 1232
Merit: 1076
http://torrentfreak.com/bittorrents-future-decentralized-search-and-hosting-100109/

the existing dht is a distributed hash table for lookups of hash data.

first steps:

https://groups.google.com/a/bittorrent.com/forum/#!topic/bt-developers/f8HL_Nu9P7g

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It's easy to imagine though how the integration between BitTorrent and the BitCoin network could lead to payment verification mechanisms prior to starting transfers, this is however, way outside of the scope of this conversation.
legendary
Activity: 1512
Merit: 1036
This has little use; DHT is made for BitTorrent, not money, and is searchable. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BTDigg

Done, I've just destroyed Namecoin: http://explorer.dot-bit.org/n/122135
hero member
Activity: 714
Merit: 500
Martijn Meijering
The basic idea is to embed searchable hashes in the blockchain that can't be censored.

What do you mean by searchable hash?

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Then use these to fetch that actual data from a DHT network.

Huh? Isn't the existing DHT a search mechanism rather than a retrieval mechanism?

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This takes *a lot* of pressure of the blockchain from people who want to throw lots of data at it, and allows you to potentially use this scheme to allow gigabytes of data to be retrieved.

Compared to what? Embedding everything in the blockchain? That's clearly infeasible.

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It's basically proof of sacrifice.

In what way?

A detailed explanation of what you're proposing would be helpful...
legendary
Activity: 1232
Merit: 1076
I know that several groups of people are working on this.

* FrostWire BitTorrent developers.
* ThePirateBay
* zooko of Tahoe-LAFS
* A friend of mine from IRC
* Bitstorage by Sarchar
* twister by xine dev

The basic idea is to embed searchable hashes in the blockchain that can't be censored. Then use these to fetch that actual data from a DHT network. This takes *a lot* of pressure off the blockchain from people who want to throw lots of data at it, and allows you to potentially use this scheme to allow gigabytes of data to be retrieved. It's basically proof of sacrifice.

I think this has many many very useful future applications. If we have our privacy aware wallets, identity, p2p communication (BitMessage or even XMPP) and distributed reputation, then together with the tools for managing multisig (distributed escrow), we can use this innovation so sellers can maintain their own page of goods that can be updated.

Think something like Tor or Freenet but fast to load and encrypted. All these tools together enable a decentralised Silk Road. If the seller on the remote end is a robot, then you could communicate with the robots over p2p encrypted protocols to send messages and update the page (like a forum or Wiki). There's very many possibilities from this tech. I especially like using the blockchain as an authority for human usable names for identities and cipherweb locations.

btw maybe you should pay to people when you retrieve the file. therefore depending on how fast you want the file, you put up an auction and gather the bids, then a special transaction is created for atomically exchanging the file for your credit (as agreed by the bid).
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