
ZeroNet – Decentralized websites using Bitcoin crypto and BitTorrent network - Syrup-tan
https://github.com/HelloZeroNet/ZeroNet
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corv
Anyone interested in ZeroNet's architecture may want to take a look at their
presentation:
[https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1_2qK1IuOKJ51pgBvllZ9...](https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1_2qK1IuOKJ51pgBvllZ9Yu7Au2l551t3XBgyTSvilew/pub?start=false&loop=false&delayms=3000#slide=id.g9a1cce9ee_0_4)

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Fluffums
While I like seeing that this uses relatively strong technologies like Tor,
BitTorrent, and Bitcoin, does this beat Freenet for any use case?

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ultramancool
Depends - it should win out for speed and ease of use. But anonymity, no, in
order for a user to possess certain content, they have to download it
explicitly and know they're sharing it. It's trivial to know who visits a
given website and, for example, send DMCAs to all of them. Freenet prevents
this in multiple ways - proxying your connections through others and using
encryption to prevent those without the keys from reading the data or even
knowing what it is. Freenet probably provides the best anonymity of any
current network as it's done in such a way that once a file is on the network,
there's just no way to trace it back to its source.

The people using Play on it might find themselves in some fun legal issues
soon, depending on country.

You could use it over Tor I suppose - that's what the authors propose, but
that seems less than optimal to me and doesn't even approach the sort of
anonymity Freenet could.

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unsignedint
Looking at it briefly, Tor support is a bit misleading. It only protects
content authors and seeders, and not viewers. (Someone could just inject an
external image reference to reveal their true IP address as HTML seems to be
not sanitized.) This seems to be the key difference from Freenet.

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ultramancool
Well, that's an easy fix - view the page in the Tor browser too. Or better
yet, run the whole rig inside a VM which is forcibly routed over Tor
transproxy. Of course - this is sort of Tor abuse and freenet is the better
solution for this purpose, but if you need to view something over this in
(relative) anonymity, it is still possible.

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jorgecurio
Mark my words. This is the ethereum killer.

The problem with ethereum is the novelty factor. Everything under the hood is
difficult for the average developer to grasp and it's not clear whats going on
as it is quite new and work is on going. Another issue is that there seems to
be no clear 'voice' from Ethereum and instead you have many people claiming to
be an Ethereum expert. It killed all of the hype and excitement I had in
December and January.

Why I think this is an ethereum killer is the tech that powers it is very much
mature, proven to work quite well and will be easier for developers and users
alike.

But more importantly the end result is what matters. This has been in
development since 2014, roughly same time as Ethereum but the end result is
far more impressive than what Ethereum offers and ironically it is because
ZeroNet offers less is what makes it so attractive. For example, using Tor,
bitorrent, bitcoin, already existing and well established technologies provide
excellent privacy and anonymity. Sure, ethereum might be a much stronger
cyrtographic platform but I think accessibility, speed, scalability,
adoptibility gained from ZeroNet's setup is what ultimately blows Ethereum out
of the water.

The codebase seems super light and accessible too compared to Ethereum.

Anyways, I could be wrong of course but I think ZeroNet could be it. Look how
long Tor, BitTorrent, Bitcoin protocols have survived and grown in adoption
rates. Ethereum is trying to pull off all three and as a result it's losing
developer passion imo. For instance the forums are less active and ironically
attracted lot of politically fueled angsty types who believe in conspiracy
theories.

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tylershuster
My understanding is that the primary value of Ethereum other then its
decentralized nature is the capacity for smart contracts. A cursory
examination of this project doesn't look like it supports that.

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corv
Right. ZeroNet and Ethereum don't compete with each other. Ethereum will never
be a decentralized CDN the way ZeroNet or IPFS are.

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mtgx
What are ZeroNet's main advantages over IPFS?

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corv
ZeroNet makes it easy to serve dynamic content with its p2p SQL support.

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kefka
I don't know.. That just seems inelegant.

SQL was great years ago. But after working with things like MongoDB, MNesia,
and blockchain tech, SQL based databases just seem inelegant.

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zbyte64
I don't think it is SQL over P2P but rather it just uses SQL internally for
syncing. Or at least that is the impression I get from reading:
[https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1_2qK1IuOKJ51pgBvllZ9...](https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1_2qK1IuOKJ51pgBvllZ9Yu7Au2l551t3XBgyTSvilew/pub?start=false&loop=false&delayms=3000#slide=id.g9a1cce9ee_0_4)

Sqlite is preferred for embedded databases which seems to be what this app is
using it for.

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kefka
That's not as bad as I was thinking. It sounded like (and documents are
sketchy) that this was some sort of shared SQLite db over their net. It
sounded rife with potential problems and interesting injection issues. I've
dealt with enough bad SQL statements and poor websites with injections and
all. Poor bobby tables.

Now, I thought about how to handle a similar dynamic data issue with IPFS: We
had Usenet years ago and it's still creaking along in a few places. What if we
bring that tech back, to an IPFS era? I'd be eminently glad to get rid of
'forums', and go back to what we had prior.

The only piece that was missing is how we maintain all the different groups
and posts. That's now solved by a blockchain containing the root pointing
towards other 'chains, and then to posts themselves. I'm seeing it in my head
how to construct this, but it could be relying on faulty understandings too :)

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alvern
I had this running as a node on a RPi2 for a few months. Very light duty and
did not consume a lot of resources. Every so often zeronet pages would go dark
when the owners made the keys private.

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wallacoloo
Hmm. I'm curious about this - it seems that since this is torrent-based,
archivability should be trivial - as long as on person still possess the data,
regardless of what the author does, it should be possible for other users to
reach that data.

The issues you speak of (with a page going dark) are strictly due to things
like DNS changes, right? So other users can still visit webpages by connecting
directly to the torrent some other way - right?

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kafke
Yeah. There's no reason a site would "go dark" unless either there's no more
seeders for the site (everyone deleted it off their computer, or the people
who have it aren't running ZeroNet anymore) or the Namecoin .bit domain
expired and no longer links to the ZeroNet address (at which point you could
still access it through the long address that will never expire).

As long as someone has the page, it won't go down.

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amirouche
Does it use bittorrent mutable keys BEP?

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amirouche
The answer is no.

