Couldn't some form of blockchain work here? Like couldn't some form of distributed/democratized community curation and moderation happen by using the blockchain to manage the arbitration of new torrents (and their successors, like when the community decides New Random Anime X encoding to be a superior copy)? Plus you have proof of stake or whatever the leading mechanism is to help combat and filter out fakes/illegal activity (etc)?
Then you'd have blockchain managing the trackers and torrents managing the file sharing.
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.
And cryptocurrency is usually used for illegal stuff, so it is not necessarily desirable.
In the Bitcoin world, Ordinals have started to make waves as they are a creative use of unintended consequences. This will likely spur other innovations.
In the EVM world, DeFi is still used all the time. It lost a lot of steam from the last bull run, but trading, be your own bank, interest arbitrage, options, perps, all of that is still going on quite a bit. New sites are popping up all the time. LybraFinance LUSD/eUSD is one of the more recent ones.
Blockchain sounds lile experimental engineering
IPFS might be a more modern alternative but it has similar issues. It's used for fairly small files such as books (libgen) but not really for movies.
Edit: Or do you man the torrent files only? That might work but they really are just links, it might be a bit overkill for them.
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
True, it worked really well for a while but lately it's been pretty terrible due to local copyright representatives suing major uploaders and others stopping because they just got old.
Also the notice & takedown has really killed usenet a bit. Private trackers are hard to get into just like with torrents.
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.
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.
