I was trying to download a book today and found no mirrors of libgen working and had to resort to Anna's Archive to download it. There was a captcha and an absurd wait to download a <1 MB file.
Why would libgen work fine with high uptime, if it doesn't make profits by running and has to deal with government attacks all the time? And sure, Anna's Archive needs some rate limiting and bot detection software to keep it's load under control.
But all of this would work 100x better for everyone if the right incentives were in place. I would have been more than happy to pay 100-1000 sats to get the book without a captcha, without waiting, without wasting time to find a working mirror, ...
Same goes for other type of content, that was discussed here #1019924.
Has something like this been tried? Is the current state of Nostr, Tor, VPNs, and other tools sufficient for building such a platform without the participants getting into legal trouble? If not, what's missing?