Archiving the Cock Hero World

[doremi]

I meant the title similarity with this: "Mapping the Cock Hero World".

Production's availability comes and go over time, and then come back again. It's so hard to have a reliable system. As soon as a public link is available, it becomes a target. Torrents are tougher, but lack of seed is an issue. I'm dreaming of (and thinking/conceptualizing) a distributed download system, similar to the toughness of the bitcoin blockchain... Maybe one day!

In the meantime, I have a list of Cock Hero productions that seems to be available on torrents, but not on Mega. Are some of you with a fast bandwidth and some time to kill willing to bring them to your Mega for a day or two so I can grab them? There's no rush at all for that.

Send me a PM if interested.

[A Ghoul Editor]

I'm dreaming of (and thinking/conceptualizing) a distributed download system, similar to the toughness of the bitcoin blockchain... Maybe one day!

Aren't we all dreaming of that?

Perhaps not.

But I am!

There are things that are supposed to be exactly that, distributed storage incentivized by some token. Some examples are filecoin, arweave, and crust. They all claim to be decentralized and censorship-resistant. But they also all have various "moderation" mechanisms, so I'm not sure how real they are. I haven't had the time and energy to research them yet in-depth. But I think it's worth keeping an eye on these systems. Maybe one day, one of them will be real.

It's kind of like NFTs. I want NFTs to be real. I want it BADLY. They say they are decentralized and censorship-resistant but anyone who's seen NFTs get "de-listed" from marketplaces knows it's a lie. Besides, Ethereum itself isn't even all that decentralized.

In any case, archival and preservation is a topic I'm interested in.

[LondonGent]

I'm dreaming of (and thinking/conceptualizing) a distributed download system, similar to the toughness of the bitcoin blockchain... Maybe one day!

So, you mean bittorrent then?

As long as one person is still seeding, the file is still available. If there are zero people sharing a file, then no fancy new distributed system will be able to make it available. Why reinvent the wheel?

[A Ghoul Editor]

I'm dreaming of (and thinking/conceptualizing) a distributed download system, similar to the toughness of the bitcoin blockchain... Maybe one day!

So, you mean bittorrent then?

As long as one person is still seeding, the file is still available. If there are zero people sharing a file, then no fancy new distributed system will be able to make it available. Why reinvent the wheel?

The key difference between bitorrent and the systems I mentioned is that the new systems are monetarily incentivized. You pay the decentralized system in a crypto token to store X amount of data for Y amount of time. You can't do that simply with bitorrent or even ipfs.

[LondonGent]

I'm dreaming of (and thinking/conceptualizing) a distributed download system, similar to the toughness of the bitcoin blockchain... Maybe one day!

So, you mean bittorrent then?

As long as one person is still seeding, the file is still available. If there are zero people sharing a file, then no fancy new distributed system will be able to make it available. Why reinvent the wheel?

The key difference between bitorrent and the systems I mentioned is that the new systems are monetarily incentivized. You pay the decentralized system in a crypto token to store X amount of data for Y amount of time. You can't do that simply with bitorrent or even ipfs.

That sounds like a massive downside to me. You don't just need a single person willing to have the file on their hard drive, you need someone willing to pay to store it. What happens as soon as they stop paying?

[A Ghoul Editor]

So, you mean bittorrent then?

As long as one person is still seeding, the file is still available. If there are zero people sharing a file, then no fancy new distributed system will be able to make it available. Why reinvent the wheel?

The key difference between bitorrent and the systems I mentioned is that the new systems are monetarily incentivized. You pay the decentralized system in a crypto token to store X amount of data for Y amount of time. You can't do that simply with bitorrent or even ipfs.

That sounds like a massive downside to me. You don't just need a single person willing to have the file on their hard drive, you need someone willing to pay to store it. What happens as soon as they stop paying?

Same thing that happens to torrents. It dies! Torrents here have routinely died. Even in private trackers (emp) with ratio and social incentives, PMV and CH torrents still die because yes, at some point there's not a single person willing to seed it.

But imagine if anybody could pay money to have X torrent seeded for Y amount of time...
And imagine if you also got an NFT badge for your contribution. Gamification... Many things could be built in the future. We're just not quite there yet.

[doremi]

Compared to paid solutions, we as a collective have an advantage. We all have all productions at home. The problem is sharing them.

[LondonGent]

Same thing that happens to torrents. It dies! Torrents here have routinely died. Even in private trackers (emp) with ratio and social incentives, PMV and CH torrents still die because yes, at some point there's not a single person willing to seed it.

But imagine if anybody could pay money to have X torrent seeded for Y amount of time...
And imagine if you also got an NFT badge for your contribution. Gamification... Many things could be built in the future. We're just not quite there yet.

For that to work, you still need someone connected to the system to have a copy to share in the first place. If there are no "seeders", there's nobody to pay.

Private trackers already pay users for uploading - it's just payment in kind, rather than in the latest tech-hype buzzwords. What's the big difference between uploading a file, earning 0.2 cryptos in the process, then spending those cryptos downloading something you want vs uploading a file, earning 2gb of download credit, then spending those credits downloading something you want?

Anyone who is in it for the money will target the most profitable files, and isn't going to waste storage on some obscure cock hero just in case one person wants to download it 2 years from now.

Everything else you've listed could easily be built on a torrent-based system. There's nothing stopping emp or where-ever from adding gamification, contribution badges, etc. They good ideas but they are site features, not protocol features.

[A Ghoul Editor]

Same thing that happens to torrents. It dies! Torrents here have routinely died. Even in private trackers (emp) with ratio and social incentives, PMV and CH torrents still die because yes, at some point there's not a single person willing to seed it.

But imagine if anybody could pay money to have X torrent seeded for Y amount of time...
And imagine if you also got an NFT badge for your contribution. Gamification... Many things could be built in the future. We're just not quite there yet.

For that to work, you still need someone connected to the system to have a copy to share in the first place. If there are no "seeders", there's nobody to pay.

That's not how it works.
I don't mean to be rude, but there's no point in arguing with you if you haven't taken 10 minutes to go research how these things work. It just creates noise in the thread. I'll stop responding now.

[doremi]

Some people prefer torrents, some people can't use that and prefer HTTPS downloads. We've got to respect that! And the reason some of us are here (in this thread) is because BOTH of these techs are not it in the end. Let's face it! The sauce is missing something either sweet or heat.

We still need our thinking cap a little longer.

[LondonGent]

That's not how it works.
I don't mean to be rude, but there's no point in arguing with you if you haven't taken 10 minutes to go research how these things work. It just creates noise in the thread. I'll stop responding now.

Without giving away too much about my personal life, I'm an ex-software developer who now works in FinTech. I understand exactly how these things work. Mostly, it involves using all the relevant buzzwords required to attract venture capital, then making off with as much of it as possible before the whole thing collapses. Blockchains are an excellent tool for solving specific problems, but reliable public storage of copyrighted material is not one of them.

[Khagate]

Blockchains are an excellent tool for solving specific problems

I'd say even this is giving them too much credit , but everything else you've said in this thread has been spot on.

As for the main topic, the problem is ultimately that the data needs to be stored somewhere, and if you can't - or won't - put it on Your Computer, then you have to put it on Someone Else's Computer(s) ("the cloud", "the blockchain", a torrent, a server).

Trying to introduce market dynamics - in order to "reinforce" the inherent fragility of a distributed network - just disincentivizes storing unpopular works, as Gent said earlier, and puts barriers on accessing all other works. Trying to pay for centralized storage would be difficult given the genre and gray-area-intellectual-ownership of the material, and even then you would then have the same decision between paying for it yourself, marketized access, or volunteer crowdfunding, each of which have the same problems as the storage options, but for an even more tightly-held resource.

I think the least-worst option for archival purposes is, despite its inherent fragility, the system of volunteer Someones Else, i.e. Torrents.

[A Ghoul Editor]

If there's anyone reading this who has an actual understanding of filecoin, arweave, crust, or any competing file storage chain, please feel free to respond here or DM me. I'm interesting in understand these systems better, even if it turns out they wouldn't work for my use-case, or they are too expensive for multiple TiB of storage (quite likely).

My use case would be basically similar to paying for aws s3. But the difference and what I would expect from a decentralized storage chain would be:

1. Anybody can pay, permissionlessly to extend the amount of time for which the files are being hosted served, as well as how many times they are replicated. In s3 only the account owner can pay to extend the time for which the files are kept online. A decentralized system should be able to have a payment address for this which anybody can fund without requiring privileged access.
2. There's no central mechanism or point at which the files can be censored or delisted. Bad example: all files are served through shittyweb3gateway.example.com and whoever controls that webapp can "delist" your files (like erc-721 nfts: they are forever on-chain, but if opensea, foundation, superrare etc all delist them nobody can see them so they are pointless). Good example: files are served on IPFS and as long as you can connect to ipfs, the ipfs network will automatically find the peers hosting your data in the ipfs DHT.

If you can provide accurate information about how any of the aforementioned file storage chains measure up against these two requirements, I would appreciate it, and I don't care if you're a basement dwelling gooner, a fintech programmer wizard, or Satoshi Nakamoto himself. If I end up researching any of these more in-depth, I'll try to remember to come back and reply here with my findings.
Also, if anybody knows examples of other projects with data storage requirements which are sensitive to censorship (like any kind of political propaganda for example) which have successfully used any of these systems, that's also something I would love to know about.

EDIT: Adding one more name to the list and for search engine discovery: storj.

[LondonGent]

If there's anyone reading this who has an actual understanding of filecoin, arweave, crust, or any competing file storage chain, please feel free to respond here or DM me. I'm interesting in understand these systems better, even if it turns out they wouldn't work for my use-case, or they are too expensive for multiple TiB of storage (quite likely).

My use case would be basically similar to paying for aws s3. But the difference and what I would expect from a decentralized storage chain would be:

1. Anybody can pay, permissionlessly to extend the amount of time for which the files are being hosted served, as well as how many times they are replicated. In s3 only the account owner can pay to extend the time for which the files are kept online. A decentralized system should be able to have a payment address for this which anybody can fund without requiring privileged access.
2. There's no central mechanism or point at which the files can be censored or delisted. Bad example: all files are served through shittyweb3gateway.example.com and whoever controls that webapp can "delist" your files (like erc-721 nfts: they are forever on-chain, but if opensea, foundation, superrare etc all delist them nobody can see them so they are pointless). Good example: files are served on IPFS and as long as you can connect to ipfs, the ipfs network will automatically find the peers hosting your data in the ipfs DHT.

If you can provide accurate information about how any of the aforementioned file storage chains measure up against these two requirements, I would appreciate it, and I don't care if you're a basement dwelling gooner, a fintech programmer wizard, or Satoshi Nakamoto himself. If I end up researching any of these more in-depth, I'll try to remember to come back and reply here with my findings.
Also, if anybody knows examples of other projects with data storage requirements which are sensitive to censorship (like any kind of political propaganda for example) which have successfully used any of these systems, that's also something I would love to know about.

EDIT: Adding one more name to the list and for search engine discovery: storj.

Regarding point 1, that's great until payment lapses for even a short time and the file gone. Nobody can pay to bring it back. With torrents a file can be shared forever, without any payment and without having to be the "account owner" (i.e. the original uploader)

Point 2 is the same for both systems. Torrents are already decentralised and cannot be censored or delisted. Links to the torrent can be removed, but so can links to data stored on a block chain. Torrents have the advantage of not needing an account owner who could be pursued by the legal teams of anyone claiming ownership of the material that you're sharing.

File storage chains are better than sharing copyrighted material via an AWS account, I'll give you that, but that's not saying a lot. They're better than storing it on floppy disks too, but that's not sufficient reason to justify their use for this purpose. They need to be better than all the alternatives.

They are an interesting bit of technology, but I'm yet to see a compelling use-case for them. If they can lower the cost of storage below that of the commercial providers (such as AWS) then that could be an advantage, but I don't believe that's happened yet. If you've seen any examples of a market where they have been successful, please share them.

[doremi]

Torrents have the advantage of not needing an account owner who could be pursued by the legal teams of anyone claiming ownership of the material that you're sharing.

In some jurisdictions, just being a peer is considered broadcasting, even if there's no leech. Broadcasting isn't bad in itself, it's just what is being broadcast that may be an issue. And authorities can find out easily, and also ISPs that also sell streaming subscriptions.