What would it take for a decentralized pay-to-download platform to exist? \ stacker news ~AskSN

pull down to refresh

What would it take for a decentralized pay-to-download platform to exist?

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?

view all related items

26 sats \ 2 replies \ @Aardvark 10h

Honestly, there's so many projects like this that could be put into place right now if bitcoin adoption were higher.

What it would take is for all of the bitcoiners to continue the long and slow process of orange pilling the world. People are resistant to change, and bitcoin isn't a simple concept.

42 sats \ 1 reply \ @klk OP 9h

You can actually think about it the other way around: what if there were a great service payable only in Bitcoin? Necessity drives adoption. You probably didn't get Internet access or a computer for the sake of it, but because of things that were only available through those.

27 sats \ 0 replies \ @Aardvark 8h

I agree. They definitely go hand in hand. SN, for example, would have a ton of new users if everyone became a bitcoiner tomorrow. At the same time, SN is creating more bitcoiners.

25 sats \ 1 reply \ @carter 6h

https://github.com/iosifache/annas-mcp would this help? It's a MCP that can search and download from Anna's

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @klk OP 2h

There are torrents available with all the content, so that won't be the hard part.

23 sats \ 0 replies \ @AG 7h

That was an option on LifPay #364454 closed down now, shame the code was never made open source!

I'll bookmark this for our next TM7!

PS: ~AGORA is the place to talk all things business, buy, sell, marketing... saddle up cowboy!

56 sats \ 0 replies \ @south_korea_ln 8h

Scihub has gone this way for scientific articles. They have a side platform where people can request papers, pay for it, and uploaders of said papers get paid for it.

Only thing is... They went the shitcoin way. You need to buy some token on Solana.

A pity after they basically survived in early years thanks to Bitcoin donations.

23 sats \ 0 replies \ @k00b 8h

Agora File Server allowed you to sell files for lightning payments: #211262

38 sats \ 1 reply \ @hasherstacker 11h

Interesting! First thing I know, it would take LN. Good example: Lightning Video

23 sats \ 0 replies \ @justin_shocknet 7h

Thanks for the mention, off grid and can't answer the OP in depth at the moment but have thought lots about what comes next

21 sats \ 0 replies \ @carter 8h

Why don't we just make some NIP to annotate some blob is [ISBN] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISBN and then you could just index those events on different relays. Might also be able to work in some NIP-57 to pay to download the blob and publisher and relay get a cut?

*Still learning nostr so tell me if i'm misunderstanding something

28 sats \ 0 replies \ @bitcoingecko 11h

I would also gladly spend sats on Anna's archive

27 sats \ 0 replies \ @OT 11h

I remember Casey Rodamor was working on some kind of Pirate Bay alternative. Not sure if he used a LN paywall though.