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What I’m wondering is whether it’s not yet possible to have a distributed, decentralised torrent database.

You could already put up a copy of the database as a torrent and distribute the magnet link, but you’d need some method for efficiently keeping it up to date.




DHTs/Torrents are great for static data (like a movie) but bad for dynamic data, like a website with a list of movies, their ratings, user comments, etc.

There are, however, other systems that are designed to combat this, like freenet. They tend to be overwhelmingly slow, because you need to pass lots of data around to make it consistent.

Then again, magnet links, titles, and a little html are probably not a lot of information, so it probably could be done. I just haven't heard of any attempts yet. It's tempting to go and write one. Could you make a decentralized, P2P version of reddit with distributed trust? I think it's possible but hasn't been tried.


I think the easiest way is to not make it really "dynamic" but an append-only structure of static content. For example a Reddit thread might be representable as a static list of actions (add reply, upvote, downvote, etc), which the client would process to get the current state.

That way, you could immediately download an earlier version of a resource and then get the updates as they spread through the network.


a la bitcoin.

They have a big problem in their design where currently it works exactly as you described, and at "some unknown point in the future" when the database of all transactions EVER in the history of bitcoin gets too big for each person to have to have a copy of in order to add another transaction, they'll "figure out a way" to make it unnecessary.


Can't they somehow publish the current state of things, let anyone who wants to verify it from the public record building a web of trust, then go from there forward?

Or is there some subtle flaw in that idea?


Freenet isn't really good for this either - it's basically static data, too.


For dynamic content there is I2P.




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