> There is no system to keep content alive so links will still die.
Torrent trackers solved this in a very interesting way. They created an economic system where bandwidth was the currency, incentivizing the permanent seeding of content. It was illegal to take more than you gave. I've even seen an academic paper studying their system!
Bandwidth as a currency eventually proved to be a failure. It enabled the rise of seedboxes, dedicated servers featuring terabytes of storage and connections to high capacity network links. Just like the IPFS centralized gateways you mentioned. They would eventually monopolize all seeding, removing any normal person's ability to gain currency. In some trackers, if you wanted to consume content, your only options were renting one of these seedboxes or uploading new content to the tracker. You always stood to gain at least as much bandwidth as the size of the content you uploaded. The seedboxes would monitor recent uploads and instantly download your new content from you so that they could undercut you. I suppose it was a form of market speculation.
They also failed to realize that there is no uploading without downloading. By penalizing leechers economically, they disincentivized downloading. This led to users being choosier: instead of downloading what they like, they'd download more popular stuff that's likely to provide higher bandwidth returns on their investment. Obscure content seeders would not see much business, so to speak, due to the low demand for the data. Users would stock up on popular and freeleech content so they could get any spare change they could. The more users did this, the less each individual user would get. Then seedboxes came and left them with nearly nothing.
This was eventually solved by incentivizing what was truly important: redundancy. Trackers created "bonus points" awarded to seeders of content every hour they spent seeding, regardless of how much data they actually uploaded to other users. These points can be traded for bandwidth. This incentivized users to keep data available at all times, increasing the number of redundant copies in the swarm. People will seed even the most obscure content for years and years. In some trackers, these rewards were inversely proportional to the amount of seeders: you made more when there were fewer seeders. This encouraged people to actively find these poorly seeded torrents and provide redundancy for them.
We can learn from this. People should be compensated somehow for providing data redundancy: keeping data stored on their disks, and allowing the software to copy it over the network to anyone who needs it. The data could even be encrypted, there's no reason people even need to know what it is. Perhaps a cryptocurrency could find decent application here. Isn't there a filecoin? Not sure how it works.
> Bandwidth as a currency eventually proved to be a failure.
I'm not sure why everyone assumes that bittorrent was about currency. It wasn't, and that was its superpower. No matter how much you were able to contribute, you were able to strengthen its system, redundancy and availability.
The only problem bittorrent had in practice was a legal one that finally led to a problem of availability of discovery.
All that filecoin hype will lead to only one thing, and one thing only: the people that are popular will decide what files are worth to the system, and the masses will simply dump everything else and forget about it.
Add an inflation for every modification of any file in the whole system, and you have a perfect way to destroy real incentives.
I don't believe in most web3 projects because they always think it's about trading files with each other. It is not. Discovery and access to data should not be limited by your financial capability to buy things. The internet exploded because people got access to vast amounts of knowledge, for basically free compared to before.
> I'm not sure why everyone assumes that bittorrent was about currency. It wasn't
Torrent trackers were and are to this day. The most successful trackers have proven to be those with a ratio economy. The late what.cd, often described as the library of alexandria of music, had the harshest ratio economy of them all.
> All that filecoin bullshit will lead to only one thing, and one thing only: the people that are popular will decide what files are worth to the system, and the masses will simply dump everything else and forget about it.
That's certainly a possibility. I don't know. I welcome discussion about this.
> Discovery and access to data should not be limited by your financial capability to buy things. The internet exploded because people got access to vast amounts of knowledge, for basically free compared to before.
Absolutely agree. Unfortunately, this is not possible with current copyright laws. This sort of utopia is currently only possible in underground networks such as private bittorrent swarms. It's been proven by history that some sort of incentive is necessary to get people to commit their personal resources -- storage and bandwidth -- to those networks. Ratio economies were created to address the leecher problem: users who simply downloaded what they want, without providing neither bandwidth or redundancy in return.
Torrent trackers solved this in a very interesting way. They created an economic system where bandwidth was the currency, incentivizing the permanent seeding of content. It was illegal to take more than you gave. I've even seen an academic paper studying their system!
Bandwidth as a currency eventually proved to be a failure. It enabled the rise of seedboxes, dedicated servers featuring terabytes of storage and connections to high capacity network links. Just like the IPFS centralized gateways you mentioned. They would eventually monopolize all seeding, removing any normal person's ability to gain currency. In some trackers, if you wanted to consume content, your only options were renting one of these seedboxes or uploading new content to the tracker. You always stood to gain at least as much bandwidth as the size of the content you uploaded. The seedboxes would monitor recent uploads and instantly download your new content from you so that they could undercut you. I suppose it was a form of market speculation.
They also failed to realize that there is no uploading without downloading. By penalizing leechers economically, they disincentivized downloading. This led to users being choosier: instead of downloading what they like, they'd download more popular stuff that's likely to provide higher bandwidth returns on their investment. Obscure content seeders would not see much business, so to speak, due to the low demand for the data. Users would stock up on popular and freeleech content so they could get any spare change they could. The more users did this, the less each individual user would get. Then seedboxes came and left them with nearly nothing.
This was eventually solved by incentivizing what was truly important: redundancy. Trackers created "bonus points" awarded to seeders of content every hour they spent seeding, regardless of how much data they actually uploaded to other users. These points can be traded for bandwidth. This incentivized users to keep data available at all times, increasing the number of redundant copies in the swarm. People will seed even the most obscure content for years and years. In some trackers, these rewards were inversely proportional to the amount of seeders: you made more when there were fewer seeders. This encouraged people to actively find these poorly seeded torrents and provide redundancy for them.
We can learn from this. People should be compensated somehow for providing data redundancy: keeping data stored on their disks, and allowing the software to copy it over the network to anyone who needs it. The data could even be encrypted, there's no reason people even need to know what it is. Perhaps a cryptocurrency could find decent application here. Isn't there a filecoin? Not sure how it works.