[HN Gopher] Show HN: Web3Torrent - Adding Ethereum Micropayments...
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Show HN: Web3Torrent - Adding Ethereum Micropayments to WebTorrent
Author : lihorne
Score : 151 points
Date : 2020-06-22 16:23 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (blog.statechannels.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (blog.statechannels.org)
| lgats wrote:
| How long until this is built into a decentralized PopcornTime-
| like service?
| Sargos wrote:
| This would become the ultimate streaming service. All titles,
| from everywhere, available on one service. Add in a revenue
| sharing model for copyright holders and you've got the ultimate
| entertainment platform.
| pkage wrote:
| That was the original idea for Netflix, but the problem is
| that all the copyright holders decided that they wanted the
| profits that Netflix was pulling in and created their own
| streaming services.
|
| Pretty soon some ISP is going to sell a bulk subscription to
| these streaming services alongside their internet package and
| we'll have truly come full circle.
| Sargos wrote:
| Yep, all of the property owners want their rent seeking
| platforms.
|
| The fun thing about this service is that the copyright
| holders don't get a choice. Their content will be on the
| platform regardless of what they want so they have an
| incentive to join the profit sharing in order to better
| control their metadata on the service and provide better
| support for their users. Or they can sit and complain and
| lose out on any of the profits.
| thekyle wrote:
| Sounds kinda like the idea behind the Brave browser.
| derefr wrote:
| > Pretty soon some ISP is going to sell a bulk subscription
| to these streaming services alongside their internet
| package and we'll have truly come full circle.
|
| The real question is why there isn't a Aereo-like service
| where users time-share a pool of streaming subscriptions on
| different streaming services.
| Ayesh wrote:
| It already exists. In Sri Lanka, the biggest ISP (Dialog)
| has a subscription that pays for Netflix, and provides some
| extra bandwidth to use it: https://www.dialog.lk/netflix
| saurik wrote:
| I honestly haven't spent much time looking into "virtual state
| channels", but I guess, as someone from Orchid, where we have
| been tackling this kind of problem in what I've always felt was a
| much simpler and "more straightforward" way than needing a full
| "layer 2" network--we are using "probabilistic nanopayments",
| which is a concept that goes back to the 90s and thereby doesn't
| have a lot of "crypto" context associated with it, but even that
| always felt like a feature ;P) that allows for amortized on-chain
| settlement in a fully peer-to-peer/distributed way (with no
| federated network of channel "hubs")--I'm really curious to know
| if anyone has tried to compare/contrast the techniques. (I'd then
| offer to help doing an integration of our system, which we've had
| in production for a bit now as part of an app that looks a bit
| like a pay-by-the-usage VPN market, into Web3Torrent, but I can't
| tell if the background goal here is to examine all solutions in
| an attempt to make Ethereum more usable, or if the effort is to
| narrowly focus on this specific vision of state channels, at
| which point that would clearly be an awkward interaction at best
| ;P.)
| tomphoolery wrote:
| > Users can upload files and begin seeding to earn small,
| incremental, amounts of money from anyone that downloads from
| them.
|
| How do you know that the user uploading the file actually owns
| the rights to distribute the file? Wouldn't this just incentivize
| those with the infrastructure (e.g., money/bandwidth) to take
| over the market and suddenly get paid for sharing others'
| content?
|
| The idea of "let's combine a distributed filesharing system with
| a distributed currency" is completely sound, and one that I've
| worked on in the past. But this is a totally backwards way of
| approaching the problem. You have no way of actually paying the
| content creators, just the content hosts. It's just more of the
| same, and at least with Spotify I get some neat analytical tools.
| But this just seems like it's designed to help the people who run
| topsites, not the people who actually make the content and NEED
| the money.
|
| Thumbs down until you figure out the problem of rights management
| through your protocol.
| saurik wrote:
| > How do you know that the user uploading the file actually
| owns the rights to distribute the file?
|
| While I appreciate that BitTorrent files are technically used
| to distribute some "legitimate" things, even in those cases the
| people you are talking to are part of a swarm: like, the
| premise is that you are paying someone to have helped you get
| more of a file you are downloading that everyone has agreed
| shall cost nothing (whether or not it actually does), not that
| you are compensating them for the file itself (which would have
| value above and beyond the bandwidth and cpu costs).
| neiman wrote:
| They're building a software, not a service. They can't control
| what their users do with their software, in the same way that
| Microsoft can't control if you use Word to re-publish Harry
| Potter under your name.
|
| Evaluate them by the software they build, not by how
| potentially some people will use it.
| random_kris wrote:
| Could this be ported to bitcoin lightning ?
| tmcls wrote:
| [Member of the statechannels.org team here.]
|
| Not directly. State channels are similar to lightning, but
| there's a key difference:
|
| * in lightning each payment is routed through the network
| independently, requiring participation from the intermediary
| nodes
|
| * in a state channel the intermediary nodes are used to
| establish a channel and then the payments are direct
|
| The upshot is that in state channels, once the connection is
| established, the payments are truly peer-to-peer, and don't
| need any interaction with a third party.
|
| We use this property in Web3Torrent, as the payments are sent
| directly peer-to-peer on top of the webtorrent messaging layer.
| This wouldn't be possible with lightning, though you could
| probably find another way to accomplish something similar.
| tphyahoo2 wrote:
| I will try to assume good faith here, and just state facts.
|
| Lightning channels are 2 end points, p2p.
|
| Lightning routes are a sequence of lightning channels. Routes
| are also 2 end points, also p2p. No trusted is required for
| intermediaries.
|
| Every internet packet, unless it is you to your lan router,
| passes through many intermediaries. I have no idea how
| ethereum state channels work, but I assume they route using
| tcp/ip, and statechannel team understands this as p2p.
|
| So anyway, lightning is p2p.
|
| Cheers.
|
| https://standardcrypto.wordpress.com/2020/04/30/a16z-struggl.
| ..
| homakov wrote:
| What happened to traditional definition of state channels?
|
| It used to be just like payment channels, but with a bigger
| scope and more fancy state operations.
|
| The trick with avoiding multiparties was called "virtual
| state channels" or something like that. When did it change?
| xiphias2 wrote:
| There's no reason why it couldn't be implemented. At some point
| I'm sure it will be, as these kinds of protocols are needed for
| decentralized data sharing in the future.
| sebstar wrote:
| [perun.network member here] It would be possible using Bitcoin
| Virtual Channels as introduced here:
| https://eprint.iacr.org/2020/554 But the implementation of this
| is hard.
| miguelmota wrote:
| Not really because it's tightly coupled with Ethereum smart
| contracts. It looks like it was built on top of WebTorrent App
| (webtorrent.io). Web3Torrent is currently live on the Goerli
| testnet.
| brugeman wrote:
| I guess so. Seeder would need to send us a lightning invoice,
| and after we make a payment we'd repeat the request with a
| proof of payment and the seeder would send us the next chunk of
| data. AFAIK Bittorrent protocols are quite extensible, and
| adding such metadata should be possible. However, this (paid
| torrent seeding) only makes economic sense if all seeders
| demand payment, and then the cheapest ones will be winning,
| driving prices close to zero.
|
| Nice idea anyways, great to see people experimenting in the
| space!
| homakov wrote:
| I can routinely download any torrent in the world on top speed...
| What problem does it solve?
|
| Torrents, as a poor choice for the "killer app", aside, state
| channels are a curious technology but most traditional
| implementations [fully pre-collateralized channels] have a design
| flaw where no one wants to put money to the end user, while
| happily accepting inward capacity from the senders. Haven't
| looked into this specific implementation, i wonder if it has a
| fix for this. "Virtual channels" sound relevant here.
| imhoguy wrote:
| Can you? What about these countless "0 seeders" rare materials
| which never start or stop forever at 90% mark?
| homakov wrote:
| Didn't experience this problem much.
|
| If not found on any tracker, such a material is probably too
| rare for anyone to care about. Even with some monetization
| model in place, it would be unrealistic to keep all sorts of
| "rare" materials in the world to make $1 from a random
| stranger coming once a year.
|
| Anyway, I would't pay $1
| vvillena wrote:
| Rare materials are what made some trackers great. Remember
| what.cd? That was the most comprehensive music catalogue
| ever. And it worked.
|
| Also, there's the issue of people finding rare source
| materials, but keeping them to themselves, because sharing
| is a hassle. Monetization would help incentivize these
| people.
| homakov wrote:
| Okay than just my two cents. I use torrents a lot and
| never had a problem finding what i needed, and i would
| certainly not pay a dime for some obscure per-bite
| streaming. Not in torrents.
| typingmonkey wrote:
| Can one state channel be used to pay multiple seeders? Or do I
| need to create a budget for each seeder I want to interact with?
| lihorne wrote:
| The budget concept is a security measure between the app and
| the wallet, so that the app code only has control over a fixed
| amount of funds in the wallet.
|
| Within the app context, an unlimited number of channels (up to
| the budget capacity) can be opened. The video at the top of the
| blog post is an example of a single user downloading from
| multiple other leechers & seeders while simultaneously
| uploading to other leechers.
| tmcls wrote:
| The funds you deposit at the beginning can be used to pay
| multiple seeders. You have one "ledger channel", funded by that
| on-chain deposit, which is being used to open a "virtual
| channel" for each seeder you connect to.
|
| There's a bit more about it in this post:
| https://blog.statechannels.org/channels-funding-channels/.
| typingmonkey wrote:
| Thank you for explanation. So this solves something I waited
| for very long.
| miguelmota wrote:
| Web3Torrent FAQ: https://www.notion.so/web3Torrent-
| FAQ-9f384d9dbadc4828aa81e1...
| yoavm wrote:
| "Torrenting has an incentivization problem. There is sometimes a
| real lack of incentive to seed a file, especially for obscure
| files where you may only find a single digit number of people
| that have it. Adding monetary incentives to the existing
| torrenting structure should prove to be extremely interesting."
|
| In my opinion, if torrenting meant one needs to pay for download,
| we would never have heard about torrents. This might give people
| more incentive to seed, but I'd never use it for what I use
| torrents - get stuff for free or reduce the load of FOSS servers.
|
| To me it's the usual crypto thing - very cool from a
| technological perspective, not useful in real life.
|
| edit: typos
| xiphias2 wrote:
| People are already paying for downloading seeded torrents, they
| are just hidden behind private trackers, as the public torrent
| selection is quite small.
|
| I'm also paying for youtube premium, at the same time the
| people I'm listening to have to be careful not to say
| ,,COVID-19'', because their revenue would drop to 0, even
| though it was the main meme of the last few months. I would
| happily pay them through lightning network instead.
| rytill wrote:
| > the people I'm listening to have to be careful not to say
| ,,COVID-19'', because their revenue would drop to 0
|
| I don't understand what you meant by this. As in, everyone's
| tired of hearing about it?
| slg wrote:
| Early on in the pandemic, Youtube was demonetizing videos
| related to COVID-19 as they do for numerous other sensitive
| topics like war, death, or terrorist attacks. Many
| Youtubers would therefore be cautious even mentioning it
| tangentially to prevent that potential demonetization. I
| think it has been months since Youtube adjusted their
| policy on this to allow monetization (EDIT: Yep, this
| policy was changed over 3 months ago[1]).
|
| [1] - https://techcrunch.com/2020/03/11/youtube-will-now-
| allow-cre...
| slg wrote:
| People pay for private trackers? Every private tracker I have
| heard of is free to use. They handle the seeding motivation
| problem by having rules in place that require whatever level
| of seeding they feel is best for the community of the
| tracker. If you break those rules, you are kicked out. That
| seems to work fine without the need for micropayments.
| gpm wrote:
| This doesn't seem to pay creators though, it pays people who
| have bandwidth to seed (redistribute) their streams instead.
| heavyset_go wrote:
| Of the private trackers that I know of, only the ones that
| solicited donations were raided and taken down. I am unaware
| of any explicitly _paid_ private trackers, and such a
| business model seems like a great way to conjure the ire of
| the FBI.
| derefr wrote:
| Consider that private torrent networks are _already_
| essentially "pay to download" -- in that you are able to
| download from them by maintaining an upload ratio, and you
| maintain an upload ratio either by renting a cloud seedbox,
| donating to the network itself, or paying for your own
| electricity+bandwidth to host your own seedboxes. And yet such
| networks are manifold.
|
| I'd love something that took the incentive system that makes
| private torrent networks work, and made it possible to have
| that incentive system "accessible to the public" without
| destroying it. Then maybe I could finally get access to the
| collections that contain those weird old movies I watched once
| but almost nobody's ever heard of.
| z3t4 wrote:
| Could replace sites like Mega uoload...
| dalore wrote:
| You would only have to pay if you download more then you
| consume. If you contribute back to the network, equal resources
| you used then it is still "free".
| ed25519FUUU wrote:
| > _To me it 's the usual crypto thing - very cool from a
| technological perspective, not useful in real life._
|
| Indeed, the vast bulk of crypto technologies appear to be
| solutions out in search of problems.
| CyberDildonics wrote:
| If you have no problems to solve I'm sure it can seem like
| that. If your country has international currency controls and
| you need to get your hands on money that isn't going to
| inflate away in a few weeks, then a decentralized currency
| that works well would look a lot more valuable.
| patrickaljord wrote:
| I beg to differ. I used to have a Netflix subscription here in
| France (not anymore), my wife is from Latin America and wanted
| to use English subtitles instead of French ones (and so did I),
| funny thing is, English subtitles were not available in France,
| the only way to get English subtitles was to use a proxy and a
| US Netflix account (not possible anymore as many proxies are
| blocked) or just use torrent.
|
| There are many services that streaming companies refuse to
| offer even to paying customers. Now you may say "streaming
| companies depend on hollywood licensing per country", sure, but
| this case also happened on Netflix produced shows...
| sudosysgen wrote:
| If you got paid for torrenting, a lot less people would
| torrent because of the much increased legal liability and
| massive increase in lawsuits.
| vageli wrote:
| As someone with no knowledge on the subject, why would
| accepting payment increase liability? As in, the target of
| the lawsuit would also be liable for the money they
| received, or something else?
| sudosysgen wrote:
| Most countries have much different penalties for piracy
| and selling pirated goods.
|
| For example, in Canada, the penalty for non-commercial
| infringement is generally about 100$, and it can go up to
| 5000$ maximum (repeat offenders and so on). For
| commercial infringement, the penalty is of 20 000$.
|
| Furthermore, in Canada, seeding downloaded files via P2P
| service is of ambiguous legality, with some
| interpretations saying that as long as you don't
| advertise or try to share it with as much people as
| possible (positive action) required to make it illegal.
| Receiving payment for this would torpedo that defense,
| which means even higher liability. All in all, it's not a
| good idea.
| monokh wrote:
| It's probably worth noting the horrible privacy
| characteristics of Ethereum. With the right resources,
| It's straightforward to track down the identity behind
| the seeders.
| Acrobatic_Road wrote:
| This uses state channels for payment which is more
| secretive than using regular ethereum transactions. To
| take the cake, the funds can be mixed on tornado.cash or
| AZTEC or whatever the latest ETH privacy tech is.
| Sargos wrote:
| Yeah, this will probably be integrated with AZTEC or some
| kind of zk scheme before it becomes a full mainnet
| protocol due to the risky nature of torrents.
| LockAndLol wrote:
| There are anonymous torrents thanks to I2P. If those were
| to become more popular, then it might be more interesting
| to embed payments there.
| imhoguy wrote:
| There is low chance to find a peer in I2P for some
| already niche material. Tor with clearnet exit nodes is
| better although still less peers due to NAT.
| LockAndLol wrote:
| Bittorrent over Tor isn't a good idea
|
| https://blog.torproject.org/bittorrent-over-tor-isnt-
| good-id...
| duxup wrote:
| I always wondered why I see such limited options for
| subtitles sometimes. Some of it I'm sure has to have more
| options but Netflix only offers a couple...
| mratsim wrote:
| This has implications way beyond torrenting.
|
| This solves the incentivization of bandwidth in a decentralized
| way. If we now solve the closely related incentivization of
| long-term encrypted storage, we would be able to build a
| sustainable decentralized storage service unlike torrents that
| are powered by fame or Infura which is powered by corporate
| philanthropy (which never lasts unless we become the product).
|
| This means that we would be able to replicate backup/archive
| services like BackBlaze or Amazon Glacier or even ensure the
| longevity of archive.org.
| michaelmrose wrote:
| How about distributed YouTube with micropayments instead of
| ads.
| derefr wrote:
| https://about.d.tube/, https://joinpeertube.org/,
| https://lbry.com/, https://verasity.io/,
| https://livepeer.org/.
|
| Everybody's doing it. Not clear if anybody cares.
| homakov wrote:
| narrator voice: no one cares
| abecedarius wrote:
| Fun history: Bram Cohen quit Mojo Nation to make BitTorrent.
| Mojo Nation aimed to solve exactly the problems you're
| talking about. It was too ambitious for its time, apparently,
| but trying is how you find out.
| teknopurge wrote:
| storj.io already does this.
| CyberDildonics wrote:
| If torrent required payments when they first existed, probably
| not. At the moment, people do pay for servers to seed torrents
| so that they have a positive ratio on private trackers.
|
| Torrents don't run on altruism and they never did. You might be
| looking at one side of the equation, but what if you could earn
| cryptocurrency by using extra bandwidth on servers by seeding
| torrents? What if you could pay for a VPN or private server
| that has plenty of extra bandwidth? What if you could find
| something rare much easier or get it much faster?
| crispyporkbites wrote:
| But you don't have to pay - you have to seed. Anyone can start
| seeding and selling their bandwidth back to the network.
|
| This means that people who can't afford the content but do have
| a network connection actually can obtain it and contribute to
| the network.
| boxingdog wrote:
| private trackers are thing FYI
| ActsJuvenile wrote:
| Furthermore, downloading the Ethereum Blockchain, going through
| shady exchanges to buy ether coins, and maintaining a secure
| wallet is a much bigger headache than simply paying for Amazon
| Prime.
|
| This is a nice tech demo but not of any practical significance.
| crispyporkbites wrote:
| That's like someone in the 90s saying paying for an internet
| connection, getting an email address and signing up for
| YouTube is too much of a headache than turning on the TV.
|
| Besides, you can earn currency from just seeding the torrent-
| presumably there would be a way to download some initial
| torrents for free and then you can contribute to the network
| directly without needing to get a wallet or set anything up.
|
| It's on the web as well, so it could be as seamless as
| YouTube, only you'd have a small currency counter that goes
| up if you leave the tab open, and you can either spend that
| currency by downloading or withdraw it by selling it to other
| users who would rather pay than seed.
| reidjs wrote:
| I like this approach to incentivize seeding, this could create a
| boom in torrenting if it works decently well and enough people
| hop on board. Too bad this is only running on test net,
| understandably.
| miohtama wrote:
| Good luck trying to cash out any meaningful amount. You would
| need to declare source of funds and you really do not want
| write "piracy" to your bank.
| crispyporkbites wrote:
| Right but if you can get priority downloads on torrents,
| access to early releases or use the currency for other things
| (eg a VPN) Then you don't need to cash out at all
| miohtama wrote:
| You are just shifting the anti-money laundering
| responsibility for merchants. It is not going to be a long
| term game.
| crispyporkbites wrote:
| Cash has been around for millennia
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