HACKER Q&A
📣 sergiotapia

Why no crypto token tied to content sharing in true P2P fashion?


Why are we still stuck with torrents as the best thing to share P2P content with?

Why hasn't there been a crypto that rewards you for sharing content on a network?

Imagine: You buy 30TB of hard drive, you have a 1 gigabit connection. What not give that storage to the swarm and you P2P to whatever is needed by the swarm and earn a crypto in exchange?

Is anyone building this? Why not? Is it an impossible problem to solve?


  👤 geoah Accepted Answer ✓
How would you earn crypto? For you to earn something someone either needs to pay (and no one wants to pay for pirated content), or if it’s like mining where the network pays you, you need to be able to find a way to prove that you are actually sending the expected bytes, and that you are not just faking it or both creating and meeting the demand.

Filecoin that was mentioned is an s3 alternative, you pay for someone to keep your files and also serve them to others. And IPFS isn’t using cryptocurrencies so you can’t make money off it although that would probably be the way to go if you wanted to build torrent+payments.


👤 bartmika
Sounds somewhat similar to “steemit” [0] crypto. However, the main difference is you gain coins from users voting (aka liking) your content and not p2p sharing aspect [1].

You have a cool idea so I’m curious myself what others will mention in this discussion.

[0] https://steemit.com/ [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steemit


👤 donsupreme
IPFS and Filecoin