lightning powered napster clone?
471 sats \ 8 comments \ @apxhard 3 Dec 2022 bitcoin freebie
I should think it wouldn't be too hard to build a lightning-powered napster clone. This could be a killer app for LN; if you can find any content anywhere, download it fast, and get paid for hosting desired content, that would be a great reason to get more people using LN.
I think what you'd need are:
  1. some means of serving files for sats, and i'm pretty sure this already exists
  2. a way for nodes to advertise what kind of files they have for sale
  3. a way for nodes to find each other
I think you could combine 2+3 together with something like an 'index' hosted on each node. Nodes could link to other indices that they knew of. Linking these indices together would make the entire lightning network also a decentralized search engine.
You could imagine people competing to run the best index on various topics (i.e. a jazz index, a beer index, a scifi index, etc), and then various 'metaindices' competing to store indices of indices.
So if you if you search for, say, "steamboat willie", your node would look for a copy of the file locally. Not finding that, it would go out to its peer indices and say, 'hey, do you know where something matching this name is?"
I'm a software engineer and i've looked into this a bit. Was considering building it as an umbrel app but i'm wondering if there's a better way to do this. Thoughts? Questions? Comments? Criticisms?
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50 sats \ 0 replies \ @Coinosphere 3 Dec 2022
This has been tried by a dozen or more different altcoins over the last decade (including one on BitTorrent itself!) and always fails with the coin's price collapse. Weak sauce. You'd think someone would make a proper bitcoin-only client but I've yet to see one done correctly.
However, there is one issue that the bittorrent community constantly brings up that you shouldn't overlook; Monetizing every file download will make the community ethos change from people who feel they are helping the world by sharing information freely to... A marketplace. Many of them swear that the day such a monetized torrent client is popularized is the day they subscribe to netflix.
I personally believe these folks to all be commies, but damn, there are a lot of commies on the internet.
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30 sats \ 2 replies \ @TheBTCManual 3 Dec 2022
I get the file hosting and file sharding thing, and if I look at what is being done with holepunching I can see the structure for this, nodes could host files, they want to sell, it makes sense from that stand point, but thinking of the use of it, I have soem concerns.
Selling digital anything with final settlement is a tough sell, how do I know I am getting the file I want? How do I know that the download wont be corrupted and since payment is final, I am out of pocket? What is the case for disputes?
I wonder how the shitcoin versions of this are working out like SiaCoin and BTT token, if had any uptake, I have not paid any attention to those projects, if anyone here has, keen to hear their feedback.

Legal issues

I think this does have some use case maybe for users who want to sell their own digital content, but as for pirate content, adding a direct monetary incentive to piracy im torn on what the legal implications of that are and how much economic force from fiat gatekeepers will come down on individual users.
Look at the tornado cash dev, he just wrote code and his in jail, if im selling a copy of the latest marvel movie for 1000 sats a pop, I just need to make one mistake wth my privacy and Disney will be serving me on my doorstep

User behaviour and incentives

People who want to pirate will always find a way to do it for free, that's their mindset, why would they want to spend money on a use case that's a unique selling point is not paying, let alone paying for that with something that has a massive opportunity cost for spending, its like two massively opposing forces pushing on your business model

Approaching gatekeepers

It would be fair more likey that publishers of content, and custodians like eBook merchants, streaming music, and movie sites slap on a LN payment provider instead, it might not be the bigger ones, but I am sure if they see that the payment savings the could get they will push it on their audience, especially if you can settle in a unit of account they know like a stablecoin on LN or Liquid.
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0 sats \ 1 reply \ @moel 3 Dec 2022
If your node, or your xpub, or your BTC address, is your identity, then a voting system could be construed where it's visible to all what score you have... and if your file is worthy of a few sats or not...
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0 sats \ 0 replies \ @TheBTCManual 3 Dec 2022
That would require a certain portion of your userbase to always get burned and then have a reactive score, and what is stopping me from masking my node on tor, or spinning up multiple cloud nodes and repeating the same scam?
I can keep repeating the same scam everytime the new marvel movie comes out make bank and go into hiding, look at the YouTube live stream scam its been running for the last 8 years and pulls in hundreds of bitcoin each year
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20 sats \ 0 replies \ @siggy47 3 Dec 2022
I think Agora does the trick. There's an app in the umbrel store
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10 sats \ 0 replies \ @timechain 3 Dec 2022
I think that BitTorrent eventually became a token on Tron and they integrated it into a client. Never checked it out to see if it worked out though.
it's a good idea because file sharing needs incentives, like how miners get rewarded.
Honestly, I would recommend trying to find a way to do it "on top of" torrents. Maybe people set a sats/kb fee for uploading from them.
Maybe try to do it noncustodially, because then you would be harder to shut down. Maybe put a Spv node like phoenix or breeze in a BitTorrent-type client.
Normally self-custodying streamed sats isnt done because the node has to be on if it's receiving. But if you are uploading files, that the program is already running.
Anyway, just some thoughts. Alternatively, you could try a legal website that hosts public domain and free open source files, media and software, and just gets lightning payments to pay for hosting costs.
Also, read up on Keet and Holepunch. It's doing a whole new way of p2p filesharing. I think it's being worked on by the Tether guys.
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0 sats \ 0 replies \ @DarthCoin 4 Dec 2022
Just use fountain.fm (and many more podcasting 2.0 apps) and pay directly the content creators. Case closed.
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0 sats \ 0 replies \ @moel 3 Dec 2022
A solution would be to fork Tribler. It already has a form of BitTorrent + onion routing + a shitcoin. Just delete the shitcoin part and add lightning.
Check: https://www.tribler.org
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