"Once anything that can be copied is brought into contact with internet, it will be copied, and those copies never leave."

Not really true at all. So many times I've found a dead link, archive.org doesn't have a copy, it's gone. Entire domains loaded with content have disappeared. In general, people don't copy and save other people's material, except temporarily for viewing.

Unexpectedly, we have managed to squash the initial carefree copying of the internet with just a few ridiculous court cases. Even the pirate bay founders are starting to feel tired of maintaining it.

wruza

Please correct me if I'm wrong, but to layman's cryptoanalyst like me, TPB and torrents in general seem like the easiest things to move entirely into blockchain-like network. Just embed it into torrent clients, done, right? Torrents are far more real, stable and necessary than some ethereal entities.

Btw, afaik, entire tpb/kat archive is around few gigabytes.

jackyinger

I'm not a blockchain expert, but I don't think it would help in this case. Blockchains are for creating a valid, secure public ledger of transactions. I don't think you want to keep an accurate public log of everything you torrent ;)

You probably want something more like Tor. However Tor's design makes it no good for large transactions thanks to all the obfuscating hops.

There's always a price to pay when attempting to secure something... the trick is making design decisions such that the price is negligible. (Think HTTPS)

problems

I think what he's more talking about is something more akin to a distributed search system than a blockchain - you could make the magnet links last forever in a blockchain, but that doesn't really make sense if no one holds the files anymore you're just keeping useless links around and storing them on every single node for no reason.

A search DHT makes much more sense, look up keywords based on hash. Think the Kademlia network from the ED2K days. Maybe I'm being too academic by even suggesting a DHT be used, you could do it in simpler ways like flood search in the style of Gnutella - any distributed search means would work really.

I believe there are a few attempts at this in the bittorrent world, like Tribler, which is probably the most practical implementation to date, there's a few others too, none of which look particularly mature yet:

https://sourceforge.net/projects/aresgalaxy/editorial/?sourc... https://github.com/lmatteis/torrent-net https://github.com/boramalper/magnetico

The problem with distributed search is that perfecting it is hard - bittorrent has won out because websites could be used to prevent spamming of malware, track reputation and discussion of torrents and individuals, etc. Tribler has some proposed alternatives here and I seem to remember Kad having done a decent job preventing this from becoming a significant problem, but it never had the popularity.

If someone manages to knock out all the big torrent and usenet indexes overnight, these systems will become a lot more necessary and probably get a lot more popular.