So I'm a big fan of Bitcoin. A lot of people see the value in it, enough to sink a lot of money and time into buying hardware and building systems to sign the block chain. I haven't actually purchased any bitcoins yet or even managed to mine any, but clearly it's something people are enthusiastic about.
I've also been playing around with Tahoe, and was thinking that if you had a system like Tahoe with maybe a few tweaks here and there, it could scale into a massive, cryptographically secure distributed media archive, with enough compelling content that people will host it in exchange for read access, and perhaps maintained by a small group of trusted and diligent curators with write access. In the meantime, it could also provide the same goals as Freenet/GNUnet as a secure platform for anonymously disseminating information in a cryptographically secure manner. There's a few things missing from Tahoe which I have seen endlessly discussed which would need to be added for it to fill this role. The first would be a way for peers to weight themselves in terms of their available storage capacity. Perhaps Tahoe could utilize a self-assigned weight score? The second would be a sort of "you get what you give" model when storing content. I think this plays out in two different ways: reading content and storing content. BitTorrent has done a good job of ensuring fair access to content in terms of uploaded content in exchange for downloaded content. In addition to that, I think this needs to apply to data storage too: in order to store data on the network, you must contribute storage space. Mea culpa if I have overlooked guarantees Tahoe already provides in this regard, but I think if the technology held people in check, what's keeping it from hosting a large content archive which would scale to a globally massive nework? To bring things back around to the BitCoin analogy: if there were a compelling enough media archive available via a peer-to-peer system like Tahoe which enforced access to both content and storage capacity available on a get-what-you-give model, don't you think people would be willing to make available their excess bandwidth and storage capacity in order to gain access to it and also the ability to cryptographically store and anonymously distribute data? -- Tony Arcieri
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