Comment by __MatrixMan__
11 hours ago
Yes. It's content addressed instead of server addressed. We can serve content to each other from our browser caches. The original server doesn't even have to stay up, just as long as there's sufficient saturation among the clients. The internet also doesn't have to stay up so long as somebody on your local mesh has what you need.
We just gotta rethink the application layer to make it easier to reference by hash instead of by name, and a few other tweaks.
So like peer to peer? What incentive is there to keep seeding?
It would be the default setting. That's it. No one will go out of their way to turn it off when it's very little benefit to them and harmful to other users.
I don't know that they would, but the government could easily crack down on this and catch a decent amount of people that are seeding without a VPN or similar to shield their IP.
If anyone I know is set on torrenting I tell them to at least use a client that allows uploads to be disabled. Its not foolproof, and isn't great for the torrenting ecosystem, but if the government gets all anti-Napster again it would at least help.