I think many proposed solutions to the creator compensation problem end up glossing over a fundamental difficulty: once an easily-distributed work (like anything digital) is in a consumable state (and thus copy-able), it becomes basically free.
The idea that $10 for a digital copy of an album that is already on youtube (or a friend's harddrive) should be a viable business model is weird to me in this day and age.
I have recently been wondering about a threshold-based "media economy" where creators don't actually show us anything (except for clips or samples or low-res versions, etc) until they are guaranteed a certain amount of income. It's basically kickstarter. A musician makes an album, goes on kickstarter and asks for $10,000 to release it. Once $10k is reached, the songs go up on a server, or are released on bandcamp, spotify, or any of the usual channels. Additional money beyond the threshold can be made, but it will be as difficult as it is now. But they have already reached $10k (set by them) so everyone can feel good that the musician has earned what they feel they deserve.
I'm sure there are many problems with this. For one, many artists aren't creating just for money. They want to show us their creations, and with a threshold, they would have to hold back until it is reached (in the case of musicians, they might not even be able to play a new song at a show until the threshold is reached, b/c smartphones).
There may be a critical mass problem, too. If two artists are similar and one releases immediately while the other waits for the threshold payment, the latter may drift into obscurity. There must be some allure to the withholding, though?
What other problems kill this approach?
Could it work for open source software, too? Make your thing, don't share it. Demo it, ask for the release payment, then put it on github.
>Could it work for open source software, too? Make your thing, don't share it. Demo it, ask for the release payment, then put it on github.
I think it would be far more reasonable to put the source into escrow, to be released when a threshold is met. I've seen closed source vendors do that when they're smaller to ensure a large customer is not left high and dry should they go bankrupt or be acquired by someone who kills the product.
I don't foresee anyone being willing to see a demo of a piece of software, then writing a check for it before using it. In the closed source world you pretty much ALWAYS have to do some sort of POV/POC before anyone will buy your stuff.
Artists (especially music) are currently navigating a very tight legal landscape where the works they are producing might get flagged as infringing even if they took every reasonable precaution. For example: sounds that sound similar to an existing sample, or note progressions that are fiercely defended by companies who use the residuals as their primary income source.
This can cause an issue if the artist releases a work and does not receive enough to defend themselves in court, especially as the work would now be very hard to take down and the artist may even have trouble stopping the income from coming in.
Source: I’ve been thinking about this “everything is released for free once the artist is paid” approach for a while and I think there are some notable wins esp. around the Patreon model where artists can know the eventual payout before they start making. I think it has amazing potential as most content becomes “free” anyway and it would make it so much easier for fans to share openly netting in more plays, more likes, and more fans.
> Source: I’ve been thinking about this “everything is released for free once the artist is paid” approach for a while...
You should start a "media label" then. Take a cut of the threshold payment for (1) vetting and reviews of unreleased art, (2) distribution costs of the digital media, and (3) legal assistance for artists against copyright trolls.
Plenty of creators make a decent living selling their content digitally. Once you democratize the tools and distribution, you remove the media companies that traditionally take the lions share of all the money. In the traditional setup a few business people and a few artists get rich and everyone else is broke. In an economy where the creator distributes directly via digital then a bunch of people get decent incomes. The second option is the better one, IMO. Once we do away with the notion that creating art could make you rich, then it become less necessary to make sure that we have some centralized way to collect money for art.
Agreed!
Direct distribution will completely re-shape the content landscape, I believe. Probably starting with the most dysfunctional industry of "producing" music. The intermediaries are borderline parasitic there.
We now have "Decentralised AI" working in the lab last month. So also the new music discovery, recommendation, fuzzy keyword search, spam filtering can be realised with full decentralisation (in principle). See live demo of our toy example [1]. Broad writeup [2]
I think I agree with you, but democratizing distribution is still orthogonal to the piracy problem. On the one hand, I'm more likely to pay an artist if the only official way I can get their art is to purchase from their website. On the other hand, the first digital download from an artist's website may go right to a torrenter, or youtube. Is self-distribution accompanied by the task of chasing youtube takedowns? Sounds not fun.
A pre-release payment directly addresses the issue of piracy. Piracy just doesn't exist if the content isn't out there.
No one is going to want to buy pre-releases of things they haven't experienced yet. We buy things we like and most people tend to be ambivalent about things they are ignorant of. When you democratize distribution as a side effect you end up with a saturated marked. If you went on youtube and had to find new things to watch, but were required to pick out things you think you would like based on a short preview and description, then wait days or weeks for it to release, I doubt you would visit it very often.
If we just accept the fact that piracy exists and that people are going to pirate and then ignore that aspect completely and carry on, I think you would be surprised how many people are willing to pay for things they want if the price is reasonable, regardless of whether they can get it for free via another method.
> I think many proposed solutions to the creator compensation problem end up glossing over a fundamental difficulty: once an easily-distributed work (like anything digital) is in a consumable state (and thus copy-able), it becomes basically free.
You've re-discovered the purpose of copyright laws.
Yeah, it might be easier with digital, but once Mickey Mouse gets drawn and becomes popular, drawing him again is super easy for the random artist who can say it is "theirs" and draft off of the millions of dollars Disney spent marketing. Hence the need for copyright.
I'm mostly thinking about creations that are already done and can somehow be vetted, either by demo, samples, trial version, or by a reputable reviewer that gets a sneak peek.
FC built a sufficiently decentralized platform, which seems to align with Tribler. They already have apps to compete with twitter/reddit (warpcast), tiktok (drakula), and others. A video service would be a great fit in the ecosystem.
That's a weird take. After all, 'cyberspace' is not some abstract realm divorced from the universe at large. It's still subject to scarcity of time, energy, and information.
Indeed! Trust is a precious good in society and economy.
In Dec 1960 we "decentralised communication", now called The Internet. Bittorrent decentralised broadcasting, leading to streaming revolution. Bitcoin pioneered decentralised money.
At Delft University I've worked for 25 years to decentralised trust, democracy, and economic cooperation in general. As an academic this focus on running code and societal change obviously kills you career protects. See my writing from prior century on "Open Information Pools" (pre-wikipedia era) [0]. Essentially what others called the Global Brain.
We deployed a decentralised trust algorithm based on the interaction graph to 94k people, see [1]. Theoretical foundations are based on proving that the Harvard impossibility result against Sybil attacks made too strict assumptions, [2]. Leading to trust scores with resilience against fake identities: MeritRank [3]. This is being released in first version in this Tribler version. So hopefully this trust framework will help stop spammers a bit.
We now pioneered "Decentralised AI", that critically relies on such a trust framework to function in a trustworthy manner [4].
thanks for the gut reaction but FC has nothing to do with scarcity. It has to do with ownership, control over your digital footprint, and censorship resistance.
All those are forms of coercion and finite resources, which are artificial limitations that are naturally non-existent in cyberspace. What you are describing are vestiges of the physical world being forced upon the unphysical - it makes no sense.
Huh? All I’m saying is that crypto doesn’t create scarcity for no reason. It creates scarcity provided you need a ledger system where only certain transactions are valid. Any ledger system inherently creates scarcity
Crypto is a solution to establishing trust in a decentralized ledger system: proof of stake and proof of work prevent people from adding fake transactions to the blockchain.
It’s just a natural consequence that this creates scarcity.
It establishes both trust by separating it from mistrust (paranoia if you will) by making the division explicit and assigning trust to some people and operations and not others.
If you think it's concerned about screens, you're wrong. It's concerned about "did this person really do this"?
A screen isn't software. And indeed, I can't. There are specific parties concerned with building postboxes and screens, and those have no reason to be the same as those delivering mail or writing blockchain software.
We love to have more help! Hardest part is debugging.
So running Tribler and reporting bug in Github. We are in desperate need of Win/Mac/Linux users which will help us with reproduce bugs. One time we found bugs in Python Async IO standard lib [1]. The 'once in a week' bugs are difficult to capture.
From my outsider's view, the part where you need the most help is actually your website.
From the https://tribler.org homepage it's very hard to figure out what tribler actually is, and the only screenshots are hidden away in the support and developer categories, and all feature vastly different menu items (without clear indication how to get those features, if they even still exist). The API documentation isn't linked anywhere.
And while installing the client and downloading your first torrent is easy enough, there isn't a lot of info on how to do anything else. And the help that does exist is outdated or wrong. The https://www.tribler.org/howto.html seems to be for a completely different version than what I get when I download and install the Windows version, and 3 out of 4 steps don't work as described (The text in 2 is completely wrong/outdated, I don't even have the menu item for 3, nor the icon for 4)
But not much else about it. Would be interested to read more. Using torrent seeding as a form of Proof-of-Work that rewards tokens is actually an interesting use case for cryptocurrency, and not as energy-hungry. But no global consensus is different from any crypto I've ever heard of. How does it keep a consistent ledger or who owns what tokens?
I've always had a sort of knee jerk reaction against distributed systems that enforce global consistency at the protocol level. Wherever there's a conch to have or not have, also there will be the haves and the have nots.
Better, says my gut, to let either sides of a contradiction compete for legitimacy in the eyes of whatever local audiences are relevant.
Assuming consensus from the get go just doesn't seem to square with how large groups of people actually work.
So I hope that these alternatives work out for them because I'd like to have more examples to point at when I try to express this.
Haha, good Lord of the Flies reference. Yes let's decentralize all the conchs, make them all local.
Though, due to positive feedback and winner-take-all effects in complex systems like human economies, I don't believe that's a stable equilibrium. The critical resources of systems will concentrate and consolidate over time. The question is whether there's any way to manage that in the architecture or protocol to minimize the resulting harm, or whether it's better not to try.
I'd be skeptical of arguments that it's better not to try.
Once the winners take all, they tend to redecorate such that their power is easy to keep and hard to lose. Once they've done that, they don't have to worry so much about continuing to display whatever merits made them winners in the first place. No need to deliver on whatever promises made. No need to support whatever products sold. You're on top, your enemies are pre-crushed, you can now relax.
I agree that protecting our ability to revoke their legitimacy is not a path to a stable equilibrium. It'll take work to ensure that they can not in fact relax. But I think it's work worth doing. Much like how a farmer selects cultivars based on their desirable properties, so should should the masses wield their ability to revoke legitimacy and artificially select a more desirable culture among their leadership.
...which is why consistency is the wrong part of the CAP theorem to preserve. It makes it possible for the powerful to forbid states where they're later not powerful by labeling those states "inconsistent". If you have consistency, revoking their legitimacy means abandoning the protocol.
If inconsistency is possible, you don't have to rebuild anything. Instead just reconfigure your part of it to trust different people.
The reason I don't run TOR exit nodes is that I neither wish to support criminal activity (of at least certain types) nor do I want to get entangled with law enforcement for doing so. Since this is TOR-like, what are my legal liabilities if I am running this software?
But can you download data from regular bittorrent peers using Tribler? And if yes, how does my traffic reach them?
Suppose I want to download a torrent that's only seeded by one person running Deluge. My understanding was that this would involve making a connection to another Tribler user, and that user making the connection to that seeder. That would make every client a sort of exit node for bittorrent traffic, even for torrents they don't download. Is that not how it works?
It's a subject that I am interested in and involved in yet I will never discuss it on Hacker News again. The attempts I made to genuinely interact related to crypto have been terrible on this website. It's unfortunate because I feel there is a very good discussion there regardless on whether you are for or against it but we don't get to see that discussion.
We have something much older then Bitcoin. It's a simple ledger who helped whom in the network. Simple case of earning points by helping others.
Economically, its complex. Coin creation is decentralised, everybody prints their own 'money'. The value of that help-currency is based on how connected you are to the globally connected transaction graph. Then we maintain fairness in this micro-economy against freeriders. See study with 160 million trust records and 95k users [1].
Interesting I'll have to study this. I'm curious how this fares in the face of well- resourced adversaries. Also funny that the guy complaining about crypto convos went straight into hate mode for "not quite crypto" without any research or support. Presumably y'all have thought through this.
I seem to remember a time when HN was much friendlier towards crypto.
But, you have to admit the crypto community hasn't done itself any favors: Hype and endless promises that never came to fruition, astronomical transaction fees, frictionful technologies, exhausting volume of promising ("world-changing!") projects that under delivered (putting it mildly), rug pulls, thefts, and other outright scams, massive use cases for money laundering and criminal activity.
Kind of hard to stay positive through all of that.
"Numerous other projects try to create a generic approach using an ICO for funding and promising the early adopters a dazzling return-on-investment. Tribler is different. rant warning. We are non-profit academics. We do not want to replace the old elite with a new crypto-currency elite. What is changed if we replace backroom deals, lobbyists, middleman, and legal monopolies with the tools of the new elite: algorithms, early investor rewards, proof-of-dominating-stake, and smart contracts? Replacing the analog world and breading digital-native inequality does not make the world a better place."
totally agreed, that's my problem with all of the bitcoin hype - it's mostly there to make the early investments more profitable which doesn't excite me much
> So like middlemen and the big businesses that exist now?
If we're talking about investing in currencies, anyone that could have made the same kind of investment in today's major currencies would have had to do it so long ago that they're dead now.
If we're talking about investing in smaller entities, then you have the opportunity to get on the ground level of a thousand companies every day. That's not something that needs crypto.
I like cryptography, the blockchain, decentralization etc. but the pitch of almost every ICO is- get in now and become massively rich (at the expense of people joining later), almost the exact same dynamic as investing in a company like Visa.
To be clear, I was referring to my parent comment about crypto discussion in general and was not making a judgement about this particular project.
But, yeah I relate to the comment in your last paragraph. There was a lot of of early talk about democratization, etc. but at the end of the day it seemed to be more about replacing the old centralized incumbents with new ones. Or, in some cases, just giving the old incumbents a new way to extend their incumbencies. There was really nothing to insulate the space from the latter. This all became really apparent during the "DeFi" craze.
I do think a lot of earnest folks got caught up in the hype and were sincerely invested in the idea of democratization. The scammers and grifters just seemed to overwhelm the idealism. The Web3 hype was probably the apotheosis, before it popped. What's interesting is how much VCs seemed to rush into that space, yet there was barely a whisper when it all came crashing down.
Kind of makes you wonder what it was really all about.
I get there is a lot of trash in the crypto finance space, but I just wanted to see and have conversations about the very fascinating technologies, ZK proofs, etc. Every time it comes up we just get drowned in a thought-terminating-cliche style discussion rehashing other (often entirely unrelated) events that happened in the past that were egregious or comical.
I hear you. Once the community turns in a certain direction, it can be hard to break through.
Some of the technologies were/are interesting. It just seemed that, even so, the applications never fully materialized. So the tech started to feel like solutions looking for problems. And, after a while, the excitement of the promise wears thin.
A lot of the proposed use cases were duplicative of existing capabilities and were frequently some variation of, "but, this is trustless/decentralized". I just don't think that was as compelling as assumed for most people who routinely give up their data, location, etc. in exchange for convenience. And, the crypto-based "solutions" frequently required tech experience and/or some inconvenience to onboard. Turns out, centralization is pretty convenient.
Then, after all of that, we're still left with some form of centralization in the form of node operators, foundations, etc.
So, there was frequently a gap between the tech and the social aspect.
Other use cases were a little grifty from the start.
> Look how receptive these comments have been so far, that's a clear sign of HN's bias.
Does "people don't like my idea, they must be biased" apply to murders, urethral sounding, and kicking puppies? Have you considered the possibility that some concepts earn hostility?
Ethereum is useless as a payment mechanism unless you like paying wildly varying fees, and therefore its benefits do not offset it (relatively less) energy use.
How well would tribbler work for disseminating content, such as a documentary, that might get a person jailed if they put it out on more mainstream social media?
Whistleblowing documentary spreading in Europe or upper Americas might go OK with solid operational measures such as open wifi war driving, etc.
China, Russia, etc: nope.
Hi, I'm curious about your alternative model for capitalism. How does it aim to change the logic of capital accumulation? Since companies are driven by profit, the entire system revolves around capital growth and competition, which ultimately leads to the emergence of monopolies and billionaires. How does your model address these issues?
The principle we hope will work is to out-compete abusive platforms. Textbooks say capitalism requires realistic future profit and growth. The goal is to show Wall Street that profitability of Big Tech advertisement model is doomed.
Forming non-profit collectives we aim to organise alternatives which are superior to existing offerings. So you still end up with a monopoly, just under democratic governance. This is in-line with the thinking at European Commission level, DG Grow [0]. We are trying to invent the tech to form digital collectives which scale beyond millions. Very hard. Plus collective decision making. Then you have self-sovereign citizens owning these collectives, not markets.
By design Tribler is self-organising and self-scaling. We have build a DAO using shared Bitcoin capital [1] with one extension using fancy crypto based on FROST [2].
If you are worried about users holding the DAO hostage by not signing cooperatively, you might want to check out ROAST which is basically FROST done in rounds in such a way that you can withstand some malicious participants.
If advertising model is doomed (so far all the signs suggest otherwise), wouldn’t “big tech” just adjust models? What makes you think they just go away?
I’m not sure why technology is the “solution” to an alternative… people seem to just want good content delivered well. Content creators want to make as much money as possible. And that’s for “honest” content… the internet is filled with disinformation and people trying to spread conspiracies, recruit for X, or otherwise mass influence the entire population.
How a decentralized Bitcoin based model magically get us amazing content, something people want to use, and minimization of negative forces? Why is technology the key issue?
Indeed, its not about the tech. Changing the business model is key.
It might be hard to re-imagine the content industry without the current monopolists. Linux showed how disruptive an open model can be.
See here a description + full implementation of a music industry based on Creative Commons content. Artists release their music and receive direct Bitcoin donations from fans. 100% artists, 0% music label, 0% Big Tech, 0% credit card fee. It's a Bitcoin DAO with Spotify-inspired music discovery.
Indeed, its not about the tech. Changing the business model is key.
It might be hard to re-imagine the content industry without the current monopolists. Linux showed how disruptive an open model can be.
There is a stark difference between the case of Linux and content. In the case of Linux, ROI is measurable in dollars. In the case of content, value is in large part the perception of customers.
This is going to be very difficult in the particular use case of news media, which is arguably the most critical area. We're already in a situation there where "value" is in the form of the strengthening of biases and misinformation.
The point here, is that to succeed, Tribler might have to find a niche where superior value generation becomes undeniably obvious to some sizable segment. (Perhaps music can serve this function.)
I think the advertising model is bound to collapse once GPT agents / assistants progress to the point where anyone can set one up to do a lot of their internet searching for them. The GPT will take your query and provide you an answer, bypassing both search engines and websites. If you control the GPT, then of course you can simply use one that distills whatever it finds into useful information free of ads. If it is designed to be able to evaluate product listings, it can simply find you the product you are actually looking for, bypassing sponsored results. Once the technology reaches this level of capability, any trend toward wide adoption will pull the rug out from under most forms of web advertising.
I have zero faith in this direction. How will you pay for the GPT agent operations? These things are expensive to run, which means there are going to crop up cheaper ad-supported alternatives and we're back to square 1.
They’re expensive to train, not to run. A technical person could produce and run the kind of agent I’m talking about today on pro-sumer hardware. It would take a lot more effort to make something that non-technical people can use.
Well, sure. Technical people even today are able to run ad blockers and pi-holes and use DDG or Kagi or what have you. But what will non-technical people do? They will have to buy a device with a hardware accelerator, and ad people are going to get into that game just like they are with smart TVs today.
Are you suggesting the subject line is inappropriate? I just thought spook meant spy (probably the only audience to whom strong encryption and anonymity actually matter) I guess there's an older more offensive meaning.
Corporate has learnt to misuse honorary or voluntary non-paid work in the software ecoystem and grabbing power.
For example one big media outlet could adopt Tribler. At first everyone rejoices because it is recognition but what if it turns out to be an attack? How is Tribler resilient against taking over from Corporate?
Of course, it's Open Source and everybody can fork. But still, could an attack be possible?
This is a super cool project (first time I'm hearing about it), great work to everyone involved!
Is the intent to have multiple tribler-like instances serving different (content) domains or more of a one-spot search that content providers can serve their content through? I ask as I'm wondering about how you foresee this "degrading" as it scales as that is where most current content platforms fail apart as they try to grow/maximize audience.
Glad to hear it! Indeed, most platforms have a central point of failure somewhere. Note that Bittorrent swarms never get overloaded, we use that same technique: extreme decentralisation.
With increased load that website, discovery server, or load balancer gets overloaded. With Tribler we decentralised everything to the extreme of Bitcoin and Bittorrent. So there is no "degrading", as long as the freeriders are somehow detected. See our 2007 architectural documents [1]
There's a lot of focus here on the alternative economy part, but I think that's way less interesting than the rest of what this tech offers.
What we really need is alternative moderation. The most fragile/vulnerable part of traditional torrent trackers is centralized forums. It's also the most problematic aspect of social media. A successful decentralized alternative to content moderation would drastically change the world.
Interesting, but I wonder how feasible this actually is. The closest thing I can think of is the ability to selective defederate in things like Mastodon or Lemmy, where the host of your instance can do broad sweeps of moderation by essentially blocking instances that don't fit your instance's stance. The issue is that any moderation past personal blocks amd filters requires leaning against an authority, whether that be algorithmic, democratic, or our traditional style of moderation. And really, that's, in a way, what people want, someone who can handle removing unfavorable content before it gets to you most of the time. I'd love to hear ideas counter to this though.
Always lovely to see projects like this. I used it years ago after thinking "surely there must be some kind of tor-like thing for bittorrent" and lo and behold, there was tribler.
At that point hidden seeding and downloading were both done via tor-like outproxies, eg, out to the regular internet. I recall talk from the issues page about intra-tribler media, eg, anonymised from end to end - does anyone know if this has been achieved?
Yes, you can do end-to-end encrypted hidden seeding. See technical docs (slightly outdated) [1]. Everything in Python was too slow. With Rust implementation we get 10x the speed, 160 Mbit/s anon tunneling.
The goal here seems to be to incentivise bandwidth-sharing, but this is not the main problem.
For a "decentralized youtube" to ever make sense, the problems that need solving are how to compensate content-creators/owners, and how to prevent piracy.
Two problems:
- Incentivising decentralised infrastructure (this solves that)
- Incentivising content creation (completely different issue, will always require a political solution, and cannot be solved by technologists)
Time to test tribler again. Great project. I installed it 3-4 years ago. Looked great, but I couldn't get it working properly, because IIRC it required two open ports, one for regular torrent protocol, another for their content discovery protocol, and my VPN provider allowed only one port available to forwarding, per user per IP.
We're now multiplexing everything on 1 port. If you use our Tor-like decentralised onion routing feature that works.
Sadly, in normal mode we need two forwarded ports. Both Libtorrent download lib and our decentralised gossip requires their own port. We gossip about trust, content discovery, and torrent health.
It’s pretty easy to build an emission or reward schedule into the rules of a decentralized network
when the software that nodes are running see another compliant node, they expect for it to be rewarded so they all conform to the additional issuance of tokens
you just need to make sure that sybil attack attempts improve the network, as the attacker adds more nodes to earn more
Why wouldn't it be possible? My friends know what when I show up to a party, I usually bring a drink or a dish or something. There's no centralized database for this, they know because they've eaten and drank those things. We don't use tokens to keep track of this, but we could. The situation seems similar with seeding.
It's just not commonly done because you have to build and maintain a web of trust for it to to work, and that's often a level of user responsibility that's hard to cultivate. But if you need that web of trust anyway (e.g. for filtering out ads ad other disinformation) then you might as well use it for consensus about who is a good citizen and who is not.
(I have no idea if this is Tribler's approach, it's just on my mind because I've been designing something quite like Tribler, and it's my approach.)
The use of Tribler was problematic in my case because it uses a random torrent cache that was instrumentalized for lawfare after a political problem with my public employer in Spain. I was accused of having pedophile content on my computer after the prosecution's expert selected the corresponding torrents and downloaded them. It seems there are always pedophile torrents in a random sample of torrents.
The political problem was that I refused to alter statistical data for a "scientist" that wanted to publish that women after abortion develop mental health issues. They search my job computer for something to kill me and found tribler cache.
It was hard. Lost job, six years under juditial prosecution... at the end, the case was dismissed, I could show that the torrent cache was not personal, but the damage was great.
Be careful if you are an activist or have political involvement. I'm unaware of the workings of the current version, hope it encrypts the torrent cache somehow.
Why does tribler automatically download random torrents without user intervention? Is it just to perform distributed search?
In this case, it downloads random torrent _metadata_ right? How could the case be brought with just metadata? Regardless of whether the torrent cache was personal or not, if it was just metadata it still didn't contain anything illegal
linking to illegal data may be prosecuted as distribution, even if you're not the host
if you're contributing to a distributed index where people are searching and retrieving material thanks to the meta data on your drive, IMHO that's pretty close to distribution
> linking to illegal data may be prosecuted as distribution, even if you're not the host
Google also links to illegal data and actually Google is probably the largest distributor illegal data in human history (if by "distribution" we include linking)
if they argue nonsense and the judge buys, it's that.
law enforcement uses hashes of bad content. torrent conveniently uses hashes. the expert can argue if you have the hash you have the content because how torrent works.
the judge that accepted the argument about how torrent works but refused the argument about how tribler or freenet etc works should be disbarred imho.
I think many proposed solutions to the creator compensation problem end up glossing over a fundamental difficulty: once an easily-distributed work (like anything digital) is in a consumable state (and thus copy-able), it becomes basically free.
The idea that $10 for a digital copy of an album that is already on youtube (or a friend's harddrive) should be a viable business model is weird to me in this day and age.
I have recently been wondering about a threshold-based "media economy" where creators don't actually show us anything (except for clips or samples or low-res versions, etc) until they are guaranteed a certain amount of income. It's basically kickstarter. A musician makes an album, goes on kickstarter and asks for $10,000 to release it. Once $10k is reached, the songs go up on a server, or are released on bandcamp, spotify, or any of the usual channels. Additional money beyond the threshold can be made, but it will be as difficult as it is now. But they have already reached $10k (set by them) so everyone can feel good that the musician has earned what they feel they deserve.
I'm sure there are many problems with this. For one, many artists aren't creating just for money. They want to show us their creations, and with a threshold, they would have to hold back until it is reached (in the case of musicians, they might not even be able to play a new song at a show until the threshold is reached, b/c smartphones).
There may be a critical mass problem, too. If two artists are similar and one releases immediately while the other waits for the threshold payment, the latter may drift into obscurity. There must be some allure to the withholding, though?
What other problems kill this approach?
Could it work for open source software, too? Make your thing, don't share it. Demo it, ask for the release payment, then put it on github.
>Could it work for open source software, too? Make your thing, don't share it. Demo it, ask for the release payment, then put it on github.
I think it would be far more reasonable to put the source into escrow, to be released when a threshold is met. I've seen closed source vendors do that when they're smaller to ensure a large customer is not left high and dry should they go bankrupt or be acquired by someone who kills the product.
I don't foresee anyone being willing to see a demo of a piece of software, then writing a check for it before using it. In the closed source world you pretty much ALWAYS have to do some sort of POV/POC before anyone will buy your stuff.
> What other problems kill this approach?
The copyright regime.
Artists (especially music) are currently navigating a very tight legal landscape where the works they are producing might get flagged as infringing even if they took every reasonable precaution. For example: sounds that sound similar to an existing sample, or note progressions that are fiercely defended by companies who use the residuals as their primary income source.
This can cause an issue if the artist releases a work and does not receive enough to defend themselves in court, especially as the work would now be very hard to take down and the artist may even have trouble stopping the income from coming in.
Source: I’ve been thinking about this “everything is released for free once the artist is paid” approach for a while and I think there are some notable wins esp. around the Patreon model where artists can know the eventual payout before they start making. I think it has amazing potential as most content becomes “free” anyway and it would make it so much easier for fans to share openly netting in more plays, more likes, and more fans.
> Source: I’ve been thinking about this “everything is released for free once the artist is paid” approach for a while...
You should start a "media label" then. Take a cut of the threshold payment for (1) vetting and reviews of unreleased art, (2) distribution costs of the digital media, and (3) legal assistance for artists against copyright trolls.
Plenty of creators make a decent living selling their content digitally. Once you democratize the tools and distribution, you remove the media companies that traditionally take the lions share of all the money. In the traditional setup a few business people and a few artists get rich and everyone else is broke. In an economy where the creator distributes directly via digital then a bunch of people get decent incomes. The second option is the better one, IMO. Once we do away with the notion that creating art could make you rich, then it become less necessary to make sure that we have some centralized way to collect money for art.
Agreed! Direct distribution will completely re-shape the content landscape, I believe. Probably starting with the most dysfunctional industry of "producing" music. The intermediaries are borderline parasitic there.
We now have "Decentralised AI" working in the lab last month. So also the new music discovery, recommendation, fuzzy keyword search, spam filtering can be realised with full decentralisation (in principle). See live demo of our toy example [1]. Broad writeup [2]
[1] https://huggingface.co/spaces/tribler/de-dsi [2] https://torrentfreak.com/researchers-showcase-decentralized-...
I think I agree with you, but democratizing distribution is still orthogonal to the piracy problem. On the one hand, I'm more likely to pay an artist if the only official way I can get their art is to purchase from their website. On the other hand, the first digital download from an artist's website may go right to a torrenter, or youtube. Is self-distribution accompanied by the task of chasing youtube takedowns? Sounds not fun.
A pre-release payment directly addresses the issue of piracy. Piracy just doesn't exist if the content isn't out there.
No one is going to want to buy pre-releases of things they haven't experienced yet. We buy things we like and most people tend to be ambivalent about things they are ignorant of. When you democratize distribution as a side effect you end up with a saturated marked. If you went on youtube and had to find new things to watch, but were required to pick out things you think you would like based on a short preview and description, then wait days or weeks for it to release, I doubt you would visit it very often.
If we just accept the fact that piracy exists and that people are going to pirate and then ignore that aspect completely and carry on, I think you would be surprised how many people are willing to pay for things they want if the price is reasonable, regardless of whether they can get it for free via another method.
> I think many proposed solutions to the creator compensation problem end up glossing over a fundamental difficulty: once an easily-distributed work (like anything digital) is in a consumable state (and thus copy-able), it becomes basically free.
You've re-discovered the purpose of copyright laws.
Yeah, it might be easier with digital, but once Mickey Mouse gets drawn and becomes popular, drawing him again is super easy for the random artist who can say it is "theirs" and draft off of the millions of dollars Disney spent marketing. Hence the need for copyright.
The problem with kickstarter is that alot of creators end up not fulfilling their pledges, even as they receive far more than they asked for.
To be fair, that's more for risky ambitious projects like mmorpgs that even AAA devs fail at.
I'm mostly thinking about creations that are already done and can somehow be vetted, either by demo, samples, trial version, or by a reputable reviewer that gets a sneak peek.
Tribler founding professor here, AMA.
2x on HN frontpage! Most attention we had during 18 years of coding.
Have you checked out Farcaster? https://docs.farcaster.xyz/
FC built a sufficiently decentralized platform, which seems to align with Tribler. They already have apps to compete with twitter/reddit (warpcast), tiktok (drakula), and others. A video service would be a great fit in the ecosystem.
Any service built on cryptocurrency is a terrible idea for the future; there exists no such thing as scarcity in cyberspace.
That's a weird take. After all, 'cyberspace' is not some abstract realm divorced from the universe at large. It's still subject to scarcity of time, energy, and information.
Tell that to John Perry Barlow:
> Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind.
https://www.eff.org/cyberspace-independence
Indeed! Trust is a precious good in society and economy.
In Dec 1960 we "decentralised communication", now called The Internet. Bittorrent decentralised broadcasting, leading to streaming revolution. Bitcoin pioneered decentralised money.
At Delft University I've worked for 25 years to decentralised trust, democracy, and economic cooperation in general. As an academic this focus on running code and societal change obviously kills you career protects. See my writing from prior century on "Open Information Pools" (pre-wikipedia era) [0]. Essentially what others called the Global Brain.
We deployed a decentralised trust algorithm based on the interaction graph to 94k people, see [1]. Theoretical foundations are based on proving that the Harvard impossibility result against Sybil attacks made too strict assumptions, [2]. Leading to trust scores with resilience against fake identities: MeritRank [3]. This is being released in first version in this Tribler version. So hopefully this trust framework will help stop spammers a bit. We now pioneered "Decentralised AI", that critically relies on such a trust framework to function in a trustworthy manner [4].
[0] https://www.usenix.org/conference/2000-usenix-annual-technic... [1] https://research.tudelft.nl/files/89353583/1_s2.0_S138912862... [2] https://pure.tudelft.nl/ws/files/96914542/p1263.pdf [3] https://arxiv.org/pdf/2207.09950 [4] https://huggingface.co/spaces/tribler/de-dsi
That's like saying your imagination is constrained by the speed of light.
thanks for the gut reaction but FC has nothing to do with scarcity. It has to do with ownership, control over your digital footprint, and censorship resistance.
All those are forms of coercion and finite resources, which are artificial limitations that are naturally non-existent in cyberspace. What you are describing are vestiges of the physical world being forced upon the unphysical - it makes no sense.
> What you are describing are vestiges of the physical world being forced upon the unphysical - it makes no sense.
Cyberspace does not exist without the physical substrate of compute resources.
That's like saying your mind is limited by the body.
can you show me a mind that exists without a body?
Scarcity is just a natural consequence of trust
There is some relationship but some scarcity is natural- where is trust in that?
Huh? All I’m saying is that crypto doesn’t create scarcity for no reason. It creates scarcity provided you need a ledger system where only certain transactions are valid. Any ledger system inherently creates scarcity
What do you mean?
Crypto is a solution to establishing trust in a decentralized ledger system: proof of stake and proof of work prevent people from adding fake transactions to the blockchain.
It’s just a natural consequence that this creates scarcity.
It doesn’t establish trust. It’s the opposite of trust. It establishes paranoia, and even then, how can you be sure your screen is the truth?
It establishes both trust by separating it from mistrust (paranoia if you will) by making the division explicit and assigning trust to some people and operations and not others.
If you think it's concerned about screens, you're wrong. It's concerned about "did this person really do this"?
Do you understand that you are trusting your screen?
Do you also blame the post office when someone breaks into your post box?
Can you build a post box? Can you build a computer and the software?
A screen isn't software. And indeed, I can't. There are specific parties concerned with building postboxes and screens, and those have no reason to be the same as those delivering mail or writing blockchain software.
I mean you might as well just throw out all computers then.
What practical advantages are there to a decentralized ledger? Does it offer the trust that centralized ledgers and legal avenues do?
The same advantages of all decentralization. You could say the same things about crypto that youd say about open source
Do content creators currently make any income from your platform? If so, what are the statistics of this (best, typical, etc)
I want to see your project succeed, and I'm probably not alone. What kind of help do you need?
We love to have more help! Hardest part is debugging.
So running Tribler and reporting bug in Github. We are in desperate need of Win/Mac/Linux users which will help us with reproduce bugs. One time we found bugs in Python Async IO standard lib [1]. The 'once in a week' bugs are difficult to capture.
[1] https://github.com/Tribler/tribler/pull/7926
From my outsider's view, the part where you need the most help is actually your website.
From the https://tribler.org homepage it's very hard to figure out what tribler actually is, and the only screenshots are hidden away in the support and developer categories, and all feature vastly different menu items (without clear indication how to get those features, if they even still exist). The API documentation isn't linked anywhere.
And while installing the client and downloading your first torrent is easy enough, there isn't a lot of info on how to do anything else. And the help that does exist is outdated or wrong. The https://www.tribler.org/howto.html seems to be for a completely different version than what I get when I download and install the Windows version, and 3 out of 4 steps don't work as described (The text in 2 is completely wrong/outdated, I don't even have the menu item for 3, nor the icon for 4)
> it's very hard to figure out what tribler actually is
From the buzzwords, some kind of crypto scheme:
"Micro-economy", "self-sovereign", "reward content creators directly", "micro-economy without banks", "fully distributed ledgers".
It reads like crypto bolted onto torrents.
"Trust Chain" has this as one of its design decision:
- No global consensus
which I think sets it quite apart from anything on a blockchain.
I noticed that too:
https://github.com/Tribler/tribler/wiki/%22TrustChain%22-arc...
But not much else about it. Would be interested to read more. Using torrent seeding as a form of Proof-of-Work that rewards tokens is actually an interesting use case for cryptocurrency, and not as energy-hungry. But no global consensus is different from any crypto I've ever heard of. How does it keep a consistent ledger or who owns what tokens?
Edit: full explanation here - https://github.com/Tribler/tribler/wiki/The-design-of-a-trus...
I've always had a sort of knee jerk reaction against distributed systems that enforce global consistency at the protocol level. Wherever there's a conch to have or not have, also there will be the haves and the have nots.
Better, says my gut, to let either sides of a contradiction compete for legitimacy in the eyes of whatever local audiences are relevant.
Assuming consensus from the get go just doesn't seem to square with how large groups of people actually work.
So I hope that these alternatives work out for them because I'd like to have more examples to point at when I try to express this.
Haha, good Lord of the Flies reference. Yes let's decentralize all the conchs, make them all local.
Though, due to positive feedback and winner-take-all effects in complex systems like human economies, I don't believe that's a stable equilibrium. The critical resources of systems will concentrate and consolidate over time. The question is whether there's any way to manage that in the architecture or protocol to minimize the resulting harm, or whether it's better not to try.
I'd be skeptical of arguments that it's better not to try.
Once the winners take all, they tend to redecorate such that their power is easy to keep and hard to lose. Once they've done that, they don't have to worry so much about continuing to display whatever merits made them winners in the first place. No need to deliver on whatever promises made. No need to support whatever products sold. You're on top, your enemies are pre-crushed, you can now relax.
I agree that protecting our ability to revoke their legitimacy is not a path to a stable equilibrium. It'll take work to ensure that they can not in fact relax. But I think it's work worth doing. Much like how a farmer selects cultivars based on their desirable properties, so should should the masses wield their ability to revoke legitimacy and artificially select a more desirable culture among their leadership.
...which is why consistency is the wrong part of the CAP theorem to preserve. It makes it possible for the powerful to forbid states where they're later not powerful by labeling those states "inconsistent". If you have consistency, revoking their legitimacy means abandoning the protocol.
If inconsistency is possible, you don't have to rebuild anything. Instead just reconfigure your part of it to trust different people.
The reason I don't run TOR exit nodes is that I neither wish to support criminal activity (of at least certain types) nor do I want to get entangled with law enforcement for doing so. Since this is TOR-like, what are my legal liabilities if I am running this software?
Tribler does not include a Tor exit node!
But can you download data from regular bittorrent peers using Tribler? And if yes, how does my traffic reach them?
Suppose I want to download a torrent that's only seeded by one person running Deluge. My understanding was that this would involve making a connection to another Tribler user, and that user making the connection to that seeder. That would make every client a sort of exit node for bittorrent traffic, even for torrents they don't download. Is that not how it works?
I’m curious about the rewards/tokens aspect. Is this done using cryptocurrency (you mentioned bitcoin, urg, upthread), or something else?
They smartly aren't answering b/c of how hostile HN is to crypto.
Look how receptive these comments have been so far, that's a clear sign of HN's bias.
It's a subject that I am interested in and involved in yet I will never discuss it on Hacker News again. The attempts I made to genuinely interact related to crypto have been terrible on this website. It's unfortunate because I feel there is a very good discussion there regardless on whether you are for or against it but we don't get to see that discussion.
There is no crypto in Tribler.
We have something much older then Bitcoin. It's a simple ledger who helped whom in the network. Simple case of earning points by helping others.
Economically, its complex. Coin creation is decentralised, everybody prints their own 'money'. The value of that help-currency is based on how connected you are to the globally connected transaction graph. Then we maintain fairness in this micro-economy against freeriders. See study with 160 million trust records and 95k users [1].
[1] https://research.tudelft.nl/files/89353583/1_s2.0_S138912862...
Interesting, it looks like it relies on a fraud detection scheme. Have you considered pairing Chaumian ecash with your reputation system?
Interesting I'll have to study this. I'm curious how this fares in the face of well- resourced adversaries. Also funny that the guy complaining about crypto convos went straight into hate mode for "not quite crypto" without any research or support. Presumably y'all have thought through this.
If it were able to withstand adversaries it would have been bitcoin before bitcoin
> We have something much older then Bitcoin
Then it's flawed. There's a reason why all earlier implementations failed. They were incomplete.
Yes, Tribler has completely failed as a cryptocurrency.
To be fair, Bitcoin also failed as a cryptocurrency.
It works fine if you're ok with paying $130 for a single transaction
https://bitinfocharts.com/comparison/bitcoin-transactionfees...
I seem to remember a time when HN was much friendlier towards crypto.
But, you have to admit the crypto community hasn't done itself any favors: Hype and endless promises that never came to fruition, astronomical transaction fees, frictionful technologies, exhausting volume of promising ("world-changing!") projects that under delivered (putting it mildly), rug pulls, thefts, and other outright scams, massive use cases for money laundering and criminal activity.
Kind of hard to stay positive through all of that.
yeah- from the github repo linked
"Numerous other projects try to create a generic approach using an ICO for funding and promising the early adopters a dazzling return-on-investment. Tribler is different. rant warning. We are non-profit academics. We do not want to replace the old elite with a new crypto-currency elite. What is changed if we replace backroom deals, lobbyists, middleman, and legal monopolies with the tools of the new elite: algorithms, early investor rewards, proof-of-dominating-stake, and smart contracts? Replacing the analog world and breading digital-native inequality does not make the world a better place."
totally agreed, that's my problem with all of the bitcoin hype - it's mostly there to make the early investments more profitable which doesn't excite me much
> it's mostly there to make the early investments more profitable
So like middlemen and the big businesses that exist now? Crypto democratizes
> So like middlemen and the big businesses that exist now?
If we're talking about investing in currencies, anyone that could have made the same kind of investment in today's major currencies would have had to do it so long ago that they're dead now.
If we're talking about investing in smaller entities, then you have the opportunity to get on the ground level of a thousand companies every day. That's not something that needs crypto.
yeah, a lot like that actually
I like cryptography, the blockchain, decentralization etc. but the pitch of almost every ICO is- get in now and become massively rich (at the expense of people joining later), almost the exact same dynamic as investing in a company like Visa.
To be clear, I was referring to my parent comment about crypto discussion in general and was not making a judgement about this particular project.
But, yeah I relate to the comment in your last paragraph. There was a lot of of early talk about democratization, etc. but at the end of the day it seemed to be more about replacing the old centralized incumbents with new ones. Or, in some cases, just giving the old incumbents a new way to extend their incumbencies. There was really nothing to insulate the space from the latter. This all became really apparent during the "DeFi" craze.
I do think a lot of earnest folks got caught up in the hype and were sincerely invested in the idea of democratization. The scammers and grifters just seemed to overwhelm the idealism. The Web3 hype was probably the apotheosis, before it popped. What's interesting is how much VCs seemed to rush into that space, yet there was barely a whisper when it all came crashing down.
Kind of makes you wonder what it was really all about.
I get there is a lot of trash in the crypto finance space, but I just wanted to see and have conversations about the very fascinating technologies, ZK proofs, etc. Every time it comes up we just get drowned in a thought-terminating-cliche style discussion rehashing other (often entirely unrelated) events that happened in the past that were egregious or comical.
I hear you. Once the community turns in a certain direction, it can be hard to break through.
Some of the technologies were/are interesting. It just seemed that, even so, the applications never fully materialized. So the tech started to feel like solutions looking for problems. And, after a while, the excitement of the promise wears thin.
A lot of the proposed use cases were duplicative of existing capabilities and were frequently some variation of, "but, this is trustless/decentralized". I just don't think that was as compelling as assumed for most people who routinely give up their data, location, etc. in exchange for convenience. And, the crypto-based "solutions" frequently required tech experience and/or some inconvenience to onboard. Turns out, centralization is pretty convenient.
Then, after all of that, we're still left with some form of centralization in the form of node operators, foundations, etc.
So, there was frequently a gap between the tech and the social aspect.
Other use cases were a little grifty from the start.
> Look how receptive these comments have been so far, that's a clear sign of HN's bias.
Does "people don't like my idea, they must be biased" apply to murders, urethral sounding, and kicking puppies? Have you considered the possibility that some concepts earn hostility?
I'll be less hostile to crypto when the benefits of cryptocurrency outweigh the environmental destruction caused by its mining.
https://ethereum.org/en/energy-consumption/
Ethereum is useless as a payment mechanism unless you like paying wildly varying fees, and therefore its benefits do not offset it (relatively less) energy use.
what you call “bias” i call “learning from mistakes.”
yes, i am biased against putting my hand on a burning stove top.
While I can't say I've really used Tribler a lot, I've been following the project for most of those years.
Thanks for working so hard on a such an admirable project.
Could this be run in the browser (via wasm, lets say) as a base layer service to build decentralized versions of twitter/facebook/etc on top of?
How well would tribbler work for disseminating content, such as a documentary, that might get a person jailed if they put it out on more mainstream social media?
Whistleblowing documentary spreading in Europe or upper Americas might go OK with solid operational measures such as open wifi war driving, etc. China, Russia, etc: nope.
Hi I’d like to try plugging into Tribbler as a content backend for beastie.fi, which seems to have similar goals.
Hi, I'm curious about your alternative model for capitalism. How does it aim to change the logic of capital accumulation? Since companies are driven by profit, the entire system revolves around capital growth and competition, which ultimately leads to the emergence of monopolies and billionaires. How does your model address these issues?
We simply iterate on Linux and Wikipedia work.
The principle we hope will work is to out-compete abusive platforms. Textbooks say capitalism requires realistic future profit and growth. The goal is to show Wall Street that profitability of Big Tech advertisement model is doomed.
Forming non-profit collectives we aim to organise alternatives which are superior to existing offerings. So you still end up with a monopoly, just under democratic governance. This is in-line with the thinking at European Commission level, DG Grow [0]. We are trying to invent the tech to form digital collectives which scale beyond millions. Very hard. Plus collective decision making. Then you have self-sovereign citizens owning these collectives, not markets.
By design Tribler is self-organising and self-scaling. We have build a DAO using shared Bitcoin capital [1] with one extension using fancy crypto based on FROST [2].
[0] https://etendering.ted.europa.eu/cft/cft-display.html?cftId=... [1] https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/3565383.3566112 [2] https://repository.tudelft.nl/islandora/object/uuid:f45f85a0...
If you are worried about users holding the DAO hostage by not signing cooperatively, you might want to check out ROAST which is basically FROST done in rounds in such a way that you can withstand some malicious participants.
Okay, so how do creators get paid on your platform?
Direct Bitcoin donations by fans. 100% to artist. Think Taylor Swift of tomorrow.
If advertising model is doomed (so far all the signs suggest otherwise), wouldn’t “big tech” just adjust models? What makes you think they just go away?
I’m not sure why technology is the “solution” to an alternative… people seem to just want good content delivered well. Content creators want to make as much money as possible. And that’s for “honest” content… the internet is filled with disinformation and people trying to spread conspiracies, recruit for X, or otherwise mass influence the entire population.
How a decentralized Bitcoin based model magically get us amazing content, something people want to use, and minimization of negative forces? Why is technology the key issue?
Indeed, its not about the tech. Changing the business model is key.
It might be hard to re-imagine the content industry without the current monopolists. Linux showed how disruptive an open model can be.
See here a description + full implementation of a music industry based on Creative Commons content. Artists release their music and receive direct Bitcoin donations from fans. 100% artists, 0% music label, 0% Big Tech, 0% credit card fee. It's a Bitcoin DAO with Spotify-inspired music discovery.
[1] https://github.com/Tribler/tribler/files/11814767/First.Depl...
Indeed, its not about the tech. Changing the business model is key.
It might be hard to re-imagine the content industry without the current monopolists. Linux showed how disruptive an open model can be.
There is a stark difference between the case of Linux and content. In the case of Linux, ROI is measurable in dollars. In the case of content, value is in large part the perception of customers.
This is going to be very difficult in the particular use case of news media, which is arguably the most critical area. We're already in a situation there where "value" is in the form of the strengthening of biases and misinformation.
The point here, is that to succeed, Tribler might have to find a niche where superior value generation becomes undeniably obvious to some sizable segment. (Perhaps music can serve this function.)
I think the advertising model is bound to collapse once GPT agents / assistants progress to the point where anyone can set one up to do a lot of their internet searching for them. The GPT will take your query and provide you an answer, bypassing both search engines and websites. If you control the GPT, then of course you can simply use one that distills whatever it finds into useful information free of ads. If it is designed to be able to evaluate product listings, it can simply find you the product you are actually looking for, bypassing sponsored results. Once the technology reaches this level of capability, any trend toward wide adoption will pull the rug out from under most forms of web advertising.
I have zero faith in this direction. How will you pay for the GPT agent operations? These things are expensive to run, which means there are going to crop up cheaper ad-supported alternatives and we're back to square 1.
They’re expensive to train, not to run. A technical person could produce and run the kind of agent I’m talking about today on pro-sumer hardware. It would take a lot more effort to make something that non-technical people can use.
Well, sure. Technical people even today are able to run ad blockers and pi-holes and use DDG or Kagi or what have you. But what will non-technical people do? They will have to buy a device with a hardware accelerator, and ad people are going to get into that game just like they are with smart TVs today.
Great project, but can the devs comment on https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-dev/2014-December...
>[tor-dev] N reasons why the spooks love Tribler (Number N' will surprise you)
Looks like there was a discussion back then on the github issues, https://github.com/Tribler/tribler/issues/1066
EDIT: Had a chance to look through it now, looks like they addressed all the concerns back by 2015
i.e.
1. Replacing the custom crypto code with more standard libraries (looks like they settled on NACL/libsodium's implementations).
2. Switched to AES-GCM and then later ChaChaPoly
3. Fixed up the tor protocol issues too.
Probably more but there's a lot going on.
ECB and random.randint, wow. I'm not sure any dev comment could redeem crypto sins like that in such a project.
Deadly mistakes from 2014. Full redesign and new Rust code.
Are you suggesting the subject line is inappropriate? I just thought spook meant spy (probably the only audience to whom strong encryption and anonymity actually matter) I guess there's an older more offensive meaning.
Corporate has learnt to misuse honorary or voluntary non-paid work in the software ecoystem and grabbing power.
For example one big media outlet could adopt Tribler. At first everyone rejoices because it is recognition but what if it turns out to be an attack? How is Tribler resilient against taking over from Corporate?
Of course, it's Open Source and everybody can fork. But still, could an attack be possible?
reminds me of "EEE" for incumbents to destroy new platforms; "Embrace, Extend, Extinguish"
This is a super cool project (first time I'm hearing about it), great work to everyone involved!
Is the intent to have multiple tribler-like instances serving different (content) domains or more of a one-spot search that content providers can serve their content through? I ask as I'm wondering about how you foresee this "degrading" as it scales as that is where most current content platforms fail apart as they try to grow/maximize audience.
Glad to hear it! Indeed, most platforms have a central point of failure somewhere. Note that Bittorrent swarms never get overloaded, we use that same technique: extreme decentralisation.
With increased load that website, discovery server, or load balancer gets overloaded. With Tribler we decentralised everything to the extreme of Bitcoin and Bittorrent. So there is no "degrading", as long as the freeriders are somehow detected. See our 2007 architectural documents [1]
[1] https://git.gnunet.org/bibliography.git/plain/docs/Concurren...
There's a lot of focus here on the alternative economy part, but I think that's way less interesting than the rest of what this tech offers.
What we really need is alternative moderation. The most fragile/vulnerable part of traditional torrent trackers is centralized forums. It's also the most problematic aspect of social media. A successful decentralized alternative to content moderation would drastically change the world.
Interesting, but I wonder how feasible this actually is. The closest thing I can think of is the ability to selective defederate in things like Mastodon or Lemmy, where the host of your instance can do broad sweeps of moderation by essentially blocking instances that don't fit your instance's stance. The issue is that any moderation past personal blocks amd filters requires leaning against an authority, whether that be algorithmic, democratic, or our traditional style of moderation. And really, that's, in a way, what people want, someone who can handle removing unfavorable content before it gets to you most of the time. I'd love to hear ideas counter to this though.
Always lovely to see projects like this. I used it years ago after thinking "surely there must be some kind of tor-like thing for bittorrent" and lo and behold, there was tribler.
At that point hidden seeding and downloading were both done via tor-like outproxies, eg, out to the regular internet. I recall talk from the issues page about intra-tribler media, eg, anonymised from end to end - does anyone know if this has been achieved?
Yes, you can do end-to-end encrypted hidden seeding. See technical docs (slightly outdated) [1]. Everything in Python was too slow. With Rust implementation we get 10x the speed, 160 Mbit/s anon tunneling.
[1] https://github.com/Tribler/tribler/wiki/Hidden-Services-Spec...
What is the onramp/offramp process for the tokens used in this micro-economy?
If somebody seeds Independence Day 2 and by some miracle becomes the most seeded movie, how does that somebody cash out his tokens?
If somebody wants to download Independence Day 2 what and how is it being converted into tokens?
The goal here seems to be to incentivise bandwidth-sharing, but this is not the main problem.
For a "decentralized youtube" to ever make sense, the problems that need solving are how to compensate content-creators/owners, and how to prevent piracy.
Two problems: - Incentivising decentralised infrastructure (this solves that) - Incentivising content creation (completely different issue, will always require a political solution, and cannot be solved by technologists)
Does the Tribler Client automatically turn my computer into an exit node?
No
Last I looked at tribler it was an attack resilient torrent/tor-like network client. Now it's a micro-economy for media. That's a pivot!
Time to test tribler again. Great project. I installed it 3-4 years ago. Looked great, but I couldn't get it working properly, because IIRC it required two open ports, one for regular torrent protocol, another for their content discovery protocol, and my VPN provider allowed only one port available to forwarding, per user per IP.
thnx Qem for you enduring patience!
We're now multiplexing everything on 1 port. If you use our Tor-like decentralised onion routing feature that works. Sadly, in normal mode we need two forwarded ports. Both Libtorrent download lib and our decentralised gossip requires their own port. We gossip about trust, content discovery, and torrent health.
Thank you all Tribler developers. Your project is awesome. With today Internet siloed in, projects to re-decentralize are a critical need.
> Earn seeding tokens
How can this be possible in a non-centralized manner?
It’s pretty easy to build an emission or reward schedule into the rules of a decentralized network
when the software that nodes are running see another compliant node, they expect for it to be rewarded so they all conform to the additional issuance of tokens
you just need to make sure that sybil attack attempts improve the network, as the attacker adds more nodes to earn more
Why wouldn't it be possible? My friends know what when I show up to a party, I usually bring a drink or a dish or something. There's no centralized database for this, they know because they've eaten and drank those things. We don't use tokens to keep track of this, but we could. The situation seems similar with seeding.
It's just not commonly done because you have to build and maintain a web of trust for it to to work, and that's often a level of user responsibility that's hard to cultivate. But if you need that web of trust anyway (e.g. for filtering out ads ad other disinformation) then you might as well use it for consensus about who is a good citizen and who is not.
(I have no idea if this is Tribler's approach, it's just on my mind because I've been designing something quite like Tribler, and it's my approach.)
It uses Bitcoin
They said it's not
> We have something much older then Bitcoin
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40159144
it's their artisanal trust me token. at least it's not monetary (yet). the technical description is a pull based delayed ledger.
the paper they link just show that by harming newcomers to the network you reduce free loaders, but they interpret that it solves fraud.
With blockchain, but HN would hate to hear there's a usecase
The use of Tribler was problematic in my case because it uses a random torrent cache that was instrumentalized for lawfare after a political problem with my public employer in Spain. I was accused of having pedophile content on my computer after the prosecution's expert selected the corresponding torrents and downloaded them. It seems there are always pedophile torrents in a random sample of torrents.
The political problem was that I refused to alter statistical data for a "scientist" that wanted to publish that women after abortion develop mental health issues. They search my job computer for something to kill me and found tribler cache.
https://www.publico.es/actualidad/rioja-paga-estudios-salud-...
It was hard. Lost job, six years under juditial prosecution... at the end, the case was dismissed, I could show that the torrent cache was not personal, but the damage was great.
Be careful if you are an activist or have political involvement. I'm unaware of the workings of the current version, hope it encrypts the torrent cache somehow.
Why does tribler automatically download random torrents without user intervention? Is it just to perform distributed search?
In this case, it downloads random torrent _metadata_ right? How could the case be brought with just metadata? Regardless of whether the torrent cache was personal or not, if it was just metadata it still didn't contain anything illegal
linking to illegal data may be prosecuted as distribution, even if you're not the host
if you're contributing to a distributed index where people are searching and retrieving material thanks to the meta data on your drive, IMHO that's pretty close to distribution
So if someone puts a sticker on your car that has the url of an illegal website, then you may be prosecuted for illegal distribution?
If i signed up for a membership to the "stick an url on my car club" then yea
> linking to illegal data may be prosecuted as distribution, even if you're not the host
Google also links to illegal data and actually Google is probably the largest distributor illegal data in human history (if by "distribution" we include linking)
and they benefit from safe harbor laws allowing them to remove the link as they are notified of its illegality
Yeah the point here is how this kind of legislation can also benefit distributed search engines
Otherwise what is actually being legislated here is that search engines must be centralized, cementing Google's stranglehold on this field
here's the thing with law, it's not code.
if they argue nonsense and the judge buys, it's that.
law enforcement uses hashes of bad content. torrent conveniently uses hashes. the expert can argue if you have the hash you have the content because how torrent works.
the judge that accepted the argument about how torrent works but refused the argument about how tribler or freenet etc works should be disbarred imho.
“Problematic” is perhaps the biggest understatement I’ve ever read. Sorry that this happened to you.
Did you consider that it might have been your employer who tricked your Tribler software to download the illegal files in the first place?
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