bitcoin as inter-node payment system

[MinistryOfDataLove]

[Zooko is creating this ticket on behalf of MinistryOfDataLove, since MinistryOfDataLove tried to create it and was stymied by the Bayesian spam filter.]

Not sure if this the way to do this, but...

I've been philosophizing about decentralized storage for a while now and only now have I found this project.

Luckily for the sake of my sanity I've found that you folks have drawn many of the same conclusions as I have (in terms of how to accomplish decentralized storage).

I'm missing a few things in LAFS that, in the course of getting high and philosophizing about dec. storage, I've found quite important:

• why not add incentive for people to participate (i.e. seed) in the network by using bitcoin as inter-node payment system? A client could (auto)setup a wallet containing an amount of coins which could be used to automatically pay servers which store data correctly. This of course will throw up a whole range of problems including the possibility of scamming. The payment model could be somewhat exponential; 1MB for example would cost nothing or something close to that whilst 100GB would cost one a reasonable amount of coins. I believe in order to get reasonable scalability in a network such as LAFS, the goodfeel coming from being part of a network is not enough to compensate for the time and money spent on participating. Especially if LAFS wants to handle data bigger than say a gigabyte.

• why not fully integrate the Tor network into the mix to add anonymity? seeders could communicate over clearnet - where the highest bandwidth is required - whilst clients could connect to seeders (or at-least sort of gateway-seeders) over darknet.

• integrate publication services to allow journalists and the like to upload data to LAFS that can be tied to a deadswitch which could be (manually or automatically) activated on certain events, triggering the seeders to decrypt the data (the deadswitch would provide private keys) and upload the content to publication services.

• could forms of decentralized serving (next to just storing) be achieved using the backbone of LAFS? For example: using the deadswitch aforementioned, a journalist could upload data to LAFS, which upon triggering would be made available in a ftp/wiki-like environment on a Tor-hidden service running alongside LAFS.

My sincere gratitude for actually working/hacking towards a working system rather than merrily theorizing about it - like I do.

bitcoin tor ideas

[exarkun]

Thanks for these great ideas.

why not add incentive for people to participate ...

I've filed ​https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/2932 which covers this idea but translated to Zcash which seems more appropriate at this time.

why not fully integrate the Tor network ...

This work has happened. It is now possible to configure a client and/or a server to operate only over Tor (or I2P).

integrate publication services ...

This seems like a really excellent feature for a very specific audience. As far as I know, nothing like this has been implemented. I would love to see someone implement it but I'm not sure there's sufficient interest in the current Tahoe-LAFS developer community to make that happen. Nevertheless, I don't want the closure of this ticket to indicate to anyone a disinterest in this feature.

could forms of decentralized serving ...

This has been implemented in a couple ways by third-parties. ​https://bitbucket.org/nejucomo/lafs-rpg/overview is one such project.

So, considering much of this is implemented already and other parts are covered by other tickets, I'm going to close this. Thanks again.