Bitcoin is going to be 15 years old soon and aside from this original usage, no real usage has really taken off for "blockchain" technologies (and no, I am not counting the occasional pump and dump / virtual scarcity scheme as a real usage of the tech). We really have to stop asking this question. And I say this having had some involvement with some web3 projects/company.

Even if it is theoretically possible, it create a huge barrier for entry, a lot of user friction, issue with governance and distribution of power, exploit, etc. And it is extremely hard to put in place for something that can be replaced by a generic phpBB forum in an afternoon. It is like trying to make a ICBM to kill a fly.

This happened in the dutch usenet piracy community.

Downloading happened over usenet, but curation and discussion on a centralised website. The site got seized and the community moved to a new forum that runs on usenet itself.

Blockchain is overkill here - don't need a coin or stake or whatever

Cryptocurrency could be used here to both decentralize and incentivize such a system. I think a major hurdle would be the fact torrents have been "free" since their inception. PoS is irrelevant here - it's a mechanism that lives "higher up" to protect the entire cryptocurrency ecosystem. Then there's also the social issues and useability issues that plague the space.

My best guess is most bittorrent enthusiasts (and myself) would like to see a more natural solution to the decentralization problem. "Natural" being incentives which arise around sharing / not sharing and similar, vs straight up money incentives.

A reputation system could work but again, Sybil attacks could happen. So some how the network needs to figure out a way to make certain actions more expensive in the large.

How would they? Torrents are fairly trivial to build a web site around.

Blockchain sounds lile experimental engineering

It's therapeutic, people use whatever is available to them. Having a struggle at the edge allows people to do the busy work they bill for while not accomplishing anything meaningful. Technical folk will find new ways to keep their thing going. If to many websites are gone people will move to a new formula (new to them)

The network of sharing software and movies is much older than the internet. Eventually you just purchase a preloaded data carrier from your local pot dealer. The drives are so large, the formula would go dramatically faster than BitTorrent. Shipping [say] 10 kg worth of data carriers is amazingly cheap.

Looking at some random portable drive 10 kg box / 0.265 kg = 37 drives and 37 * 5 TB = 185 TB ? Something like 100 000 to 400 000 hours of film. Good for a maximum fine in "lost revenue" of $ 1 000 000 000 000 for the single box.

There is a lengthy therapeutic treatment program between that stage and the torrent websites.

Eventually some bean counter will discover crowd sourcing Police Academy 8 and people will just give them money provided they desire to see it. Star citizen raised over $569 million. On the most profitable movies list nr 191 is Fifty Shades of Grey with $569 million from a budget of 40 million. I can see the problem, with crowd sourcing it would be like normal work. That extra 500 million would be unlikely. They would have to make 10 movies.

What you propose sounds broadly like it could easily be built on IPFS and Filecoin. I think you find that there isn’t enough financial incentive to go decentralized here; groups get together and host/curate for community and kudos more than for profit.

You could probably accomplish as much just indexing torrents and combining it with an HN style voting system + user profiles. There’s always risk of bad actors but the main thing is having humans in the loop to provide reputation signals.

Freenet works this way. I would replace all torrents with Freenet(s) but the technology seems to be too obscure to be comfortable for large audiences.

That would be really interesting usage of blockchain!