[HN Gopher] Show HN: Decentralized, Mutable, Serverless Torrent ...
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Show HN: Decentralized, Mutable, Serverless Torrent Swarm Websites
Author : publiush
Score : 108 points
Date : 2021-12-10 18:26 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (github.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (github.com)
| nynx wrote:
| This is what decentralization is about, not crypto.
| xwvvvvwx wrote:
| this literally uses a cryptocurrency (handshake) for domains
| iskander wrote:
| I think the evolution of "decentralized" infrastructure will
| start to bring out a lot more overlap between "traditional"
| decentralization communities (building stuff like Beaker
| browser) and some of the useful bits of crypto.
| dannyobrien wrote:
| Yes, I think this is both the biggest opportunity, and the
| biggest challenge, especially as I think there's been a
| growing separation between those two communities in the
| last few months and years. There's so many good ideas and
| implementations (and investment in harder problems of
| distributed systems) in the crypto/blockchain/web3 space,
| and a lot of hard-won experience and genuine applications
| in, as you say, "traditional" communities. It's just a
| matter of finding some sort of common ground.
|
| I do think that the https://getdweb.net/ community is a
| model of how that crossover can work. It's also something I
| think a lot about at FFDW, which because of IPFS and
| Filecoin, has its feet in both camps.
| publiush wrote:
| There's a dilemma as the magnet links/hashes aren't easily
| shareable. One option is to create a DMT directory, but this
| would be centralized. Handshake is the most mature
| decentralized domain name project, and I opted for it. It
| uses coins to limit abuse, since anyone can flood a
| decentralized system. You don't need coins to browse and use
| federalist. That said, if there are any other immutable DNS
| systems that aren't centrally controlled that I could review,
| I'll definitely take a look!
| panick21_ wrote:
| Have you checkout out the Gnu Name System from GNUNet?
| publiush wrote:
| The website for GNUnet seems to be down/404, but it looks
| like ownership of names is controlled by a central
| authority
| (https://manpages.debian.org/unstable/gnunet/gnunet-
| namestore...).
| anchpop wrote:
| There's ENS, which seems on sturdier footing than Handshake
| to me, but the gas on ethereum is ridiculous
| throwaway94294 wrote:
| Isn't this just trusting whoever runs https://query.hdns.io ?
|
| https://github.com/publiusfederalist/federalist/blob/3670867...
| publiush wrote:
| Good catch!
|
| It's temporarily using hdns.io as many people still do not have
| an hsd node installed. A later version will be shipped with a
| light weight SPV resolver, at which point, the last piece of
| the puzzle will be complete.
| mrtksn wrote:
| What are some cool websites that I can visit right now?
| publiush wrote:
| It's new, so I don't think there are many out there yet. I do
| hope that this changes the landscape of the ecosystem for
| 'decentralization.' It's not supposed to be about tokens or
| organizational marketing hype. First, it's about free speech
| and freedom of information. "De-platforming" is now extinct.
| Only then, can you even begin to discuss anything else.
|
| I'm very thankful to WebTorrent, DMT, Handshake and Electron
| for making things possible.
| mrtksn wrote:
| Thanks, the work done is definitely cool but, as with any
| other decentralization project, I'm yet to find the content
| use cases.
|
| The only two kinds of successful content types that I'm aware
| of are pirated movies on Torrent and cryptocurrencies on the
| blockchain. They all depend on centralized discovery(torrent
| websites and exchanges).
|
| Which makes me wonder, are these decentralized websites or
| social media platforms attacking the right problems?
| rektide wrote:
| > _I'm yet to find the content use cases._
|
| It's an alternative transport, not application layer. If
| you can imagine doing anything with the world wide web , or
| ftp, you can imagine what this is for. It can transport
| hypertext files around, or whatever other file type you
| want.
|
| In the web case, it'd just be some local http files you
| could open in a local file origin. There'd be no server.
| But that's still a way to exchange whatever art or media
| you could ever imagine.
|
| We are bounded only by imagination. The internet is built
| around the Internet Protocol (IP), a way of streaming data
| arbitrarily from one computer to another. It has been up to
| us to imagine uses, to chase new possibilities. What do you
| think the use cases for IP are? Can you see what that made
| possible? Your question is in effect that, and trying to
| grasp at how broad, how possible, how potentiated this
| great work is is dauntingly hard, for we could share any
| type of content we want with either.
| publiush wrote:
| This is a project I've been working on to create decentralized,
| peer to peer, "serverless" websites using several technologies
| including webtorrent, dmt (mutable torrent BEP-46), and handshake
| decentralized domains.
|
| You can create either an immutable (uneditable) torrent site, or
| you can create a ed25519 keypair and create a mutable (updatable)
| torrent site.
|
| This is great for blogging, whistle blowing, and other things. It
| also scales well since torrent technology is great although it
| had previous been pigeonholed to other use cases.
|
| Please give it a try and let me know your thoughts! I don't take
| any credit for this since I just weaved the great technologies
| others already made together!
| RobLach wrote:
| Very cool and actualized proof-of-concept. "Decentralization"
| beyond a marketing term.
| derbOac wrote:
| How would you compare this in a use-case sense to something like
| Beaker browser?
|
| Also -- and I'm unfamiliar with handshake -- but is the sort of
| thing that could work over ad hoc networks?
| publiush wrote:
| The Beaker browser looks interesting -- it looks a lot like
| DHT/DMT (https://hypercore-protocol.org/), but I speculate it's
| likely more specialized for the use case.
|
| Handshake names are decentralized and on chain, so as long as
| you have access to read the chain, it would work over ad hoc
| networks as well (and offline/local).
| oscargrouch wrote:
| This is cool.
|
| I'm also working on a decentralized distribution mechanism based
| on torrents, and while i've being working on a different
| architecture, the network mechanism are basically the same with a
| couple of differences on the network level.
|
| In my case i'm working on a very customized version of chrome
| where the web api is actually available for native applications
| beyond Javascript.
| publiush wrote:
| That sounds interesting! I would love to hear more!
| timbit42 wrote:
| Would this work over I2P?
| publiush wrote:
| BitTorrent works on I2P so I believe this should as well but I
| haven't tried.
| champagnois wrote:
| These sorts of things are still blockable through DNS and IP
| filters cutting off access to the root nodes and such I would
| guess.
|
| As such, what is the use case?
| publiush wrote:
| Seeds for the torrents can change and, although not
| recommended, in terms of bloating the Tor network, using Tor
| will also help. With the recent attack on exposing Tor users,
| it may not be a bad thing if everyone starts torrenting on the
| Tor network actually.
|
| Everything, of course, can be blocked at some point, but the
| thing to remember is that there are other kinds of contracts
| that existed long before smart contracts - and these things are
| already leveraged in society.
|
| The internet isn't going to disappear tomorrow, but I would
| agree there are longer term risks, so let's build today.
|
| There's been a lot of talk about decentralization lately, and
| Cypherpunks write code. So I wrote code instead of a blog post.
| rektide wrote:
| Wow that's a big huge dollop of nihilism, of why even bother.
| It's very unclear what your slam even means, what you are
| trying, technically, to express as the problem. Which makes
| your rejection even harder to handle with faith & respect.
|
| I also don't think it's accurate. Handshake is a
| cryptographically certified way of establishing identity .
| Since torrents are now mutable via handshake, it seems like
| webtorrents can be updated & moved as needed. Further, peer-
| exchange processes mean that having the initial seeds up
| probably isn't even a requirement. Even if one particular ip
| address or site gets cut down, the swarm can use other
| webtorrent trackers to re-spawn & carry-on.
|
| Aside from your criticism being either inaccureate or
| misleading, I'd also say the use case doesn't need to, imo, be
| 100% perfect in every way to be worthwhile. I'm glad someone
| did seek better, & bothered. A decentralized, updateable,
| browser-based torrent is incredible leap for a web of data, for
| interconnection. Even if it's not 100% completely uncensorable,
| it's many leaps in the right direction, towards
| decentralization. Especially decentralization without
| coordination/consensus, which I think is great & vast
| improvement over the harsh & strict type of computing that
| *coins have dominated the field with. This work is far more
| interesting to me.
| champagnois wrote:
| You are assuming bad faith here.
|
| The project is marketed as unblockable, etc and yet we both
| conclude it is blockable from the start with existing network
| management tools that are deployed in places like Iran and
| China.
|
| I was asking a genuine question of use case.
| rektide wrote:
| > _and yet we both conclude it is blockable_
|
| Extremely polarizing language for something that is way
| more a scale to me, and I don't agree that this technology
| is blockable. I already elaborated some scenarios where
| hosting can respawn easily, with no coupling to any
| particular infrastructure. That to me is pretty
| unblockable. There's other resilliencies offered here.
|
| The story keeps getting better, given all the resilience
| features at Bittorrent's core: webtorrent clients could
| connect to multiple trackers just fine. Since it's tracker
| based, there's no need for any specific host to stay
| online. We can all just use the existing tracker network.
|
| Even if the entire tracker network is taken down- something
| that has never happened to bittorrent & which is beyond
| imagining to me- bittorrent still has a peer exchange
| network & allows for peers to manually be added. Whence
| peer exchange can kick in & keep resilliency going.
|
| I'm sorry but I have no agreemenet whatsoever with you on
| blockability. This has multiple vast layers of resillience
| that are excellent, which have never seen active threat
| against them.
|
| What would make you happy? Do we need a system able to
| resist long term nuclear winter to be unblockable? What's
| the goal here? You've still been extremely unclear what
| your technical complaints actually are, extremely specious,
| & aggressive. And now you are also putting words in my
| mouth.
|
| > _You are assuming bad faith here._
|
| I think I've done quite well working around doing that, &
| worked hard to find something to discuss. In contrast, you
| have yet to specify a specific technical case at all, to
| explain what issue you actually have or what you think the
| problem or scenario you are imagining is. And you use
| aggressive position & hard words to double down on your
| argumentless snub, which to me reads like a bad faith
| follow-up, one I challenge you to do better on.
|
| I mostly think you don't know the tech. Which is fine.
| Bittorrent is fairly complex & has a lot of layers to it.
| There aren't great primers to get filled in on it.
| Bittorrent is a great basis, one that countless millions
| have been spent trying to block & take down & combat, but
| the system has been extremely resillient. Magnet links
| "just work", fantastically well, and are super easy to
| share, to get started, over any medium one wants. The
| underpinnning distributed P2P technologies are broadly
| capable of taking over from there. I don't think your
| short, undetailed, savage doubt is contributive or
| accurate: you should better define your issues if you are
| going to throw such a hard heavy opinion down against great
| tech.
| dang wrote:
| Please don't argue in the flamewar style on HN. We want
| curious conversation here.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
| vgb2k18 wrote:
| Block-resistant and censorship-resistant are terminology
| I've seen used in other projects. I agree that ublockable
| and uncensorable are hard phrases to sell here, they kind
| of immediately beg to be challenged.
| michaelscrypt wrote:
| How is this different from ZeroNet [https://zeronet.io/]?
| generalizations wrote:
| Also, it's a variation on the concept. It's really good when we
| have multiple implementations of a general design.
| sprash wrote:
| Seems to be not much different from zeronet. It even makes the
| exact same mistakes like not building in anonymization by
| default (preferably using i2p). Zeronet hovever is much more
| mature and has a very active community.
| ccakes wrote:
| At a quick glance, no Bitcoin
| nephanth wrote:
| Iirc, zeronet used to not have bitcoin before the craze, so
| this would be like early zeronet I guess
| zcw100 wrote:
| No but Handshake does use coins which I assume to be some
| sort of blockchain "Handshake uses a coin system for name
| registration"
| algo_trader wrote:
| Well done, good luck. Always wanted to implement something like
| this.
|
| > dmt (mutable torrent BEP-46),
|
| Is dmt supported (made scalable?!) by the existing torrent infra
| structure (DHT/trackers/etc??). Sorry if this question doesnt
| make sense.
| algo_trader wrote:
| Also, is this suitable for publishing an RSS-like feed which
| out polluting the world with a new torrent for each atom?
| publiush wrote:
| Yes and no - DMT (https://github.com/lmatteis/dmt) is
| implemented into this so you can use a single hash in the DHT
| for the 'site', but that will be updated to point to a new
| torrent infohash on every update.
| easrng wrote:
| It depends. You an either have your mutable torrent point to
| the head of a liked list like this: head
| | |- post.txt +- prev.torrent
| prev | |- post.txt +- prev.torrent
|
| You get the idea. With the not yet widely-supported
| BitTorrent v2, you can just add files to a new torrent and
| seeders of the old torrent will seed the files that are also
| in the new torrent too.
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| What are the challenges slowing the v2 deployment? Client
| uptake?
| publiush wrote:
| Thank you! I believe it's somewhat scalable, but one thing to
| note is that DHT itself is not as fast as using a tracker.
| f0e4c2f7 wrote:
| Seems cool at first glance! I've never heard of Handshake, will
| be looking at that more in particular.
|
| So I see the address in the screenshot starts with federalist://
|
| Is it possible to access these sites with a normal web browser
| from the internet too?
| oscargrouch wrote:
| from the look of it, you will need to have the handshake
| resolver installed and replaced as your local dns resolver.
| With that it will return you a the public key address on the
| bittorrent DHT which can be solved by some torrent client.
|
| There it should have a torrent info payload that your client
| can turn into a ordinary torrent, where you can proceed to
| download the files, and can open in your browser on your local
| filesystem.
| publiush wrote:
| Thank you!
|
| I do think there is a way - since the beautiful WebTorrent
| (https://github.com/webtorrent/webtorrent) can do so in
| browser. I'm keen to see something like this in a normal web
| browser (if possible as an extension even), hopefully developed
| by someone with better skills than me haha!
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(page generated 2021-12-10 23:00 UTC)