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(*) My third (and current) thought is to leverage the very nice properties of content addressability to solve the Imgur problem in a trustless way: I'd basically add a new BBCode tag (called [cai], for "content-addressable image") that would be used to replace all of the Imgur [img] tags with something that theymos could independently construct (a text-encoded cryptographic hash of the image itself, so, something like: [cai]26MrbcYgzHAo7kxxHSVxbtm6NMHn[/cai]). Getting the whole scheme to work properly involves the writing of two new pieces of software: a resolver-thingy that would be on the same network as the image proxy, and a storage-thingy that some members would (hopefully) choose to run on a volunteer-basis.
It just so happens that the way to comprehensively fix the Imgur problem also puts most of the pieces in place for an image-hosting solution that would be basically perfect for Bitcointalk:
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(*) My third (and current) thought is to leverage the very nice properties of content addressability to solve the Imgur problem in a trustless way: I'd basically add a new BBCode tag (called [cai], for "content-addressable image") that would be used to replace all of the Imgur [img] tags with something that theymos could independently construct (a text-encoded cryptographic hash of the image itself, so, something like: [cai]26MrbcYgzHAo7kxxHSVxbtm6NMHn[/cai]). Getting the whole scheme to work properly involves the writing of two new pieces of software: a resolver-thingy that would be on the same network as the image proxy, and a storage-thingy that some members would (hopefully) choose to run on a volunteer-basis.
It just so happens that the way to comprehensively fix the Imgur problem also puts most of the pieces in place for an image-hosting solution that would be basically perfect for Bitcointalk:
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Hmm interesting stuff, in terms of a full image-hosting solution, are you saying users would upload images to a 3rd party [p2p?] imagery DB that is delivering content based on a hash which is derived from the content of the image only? And it would then provide them a [cai] code? Or does the user somehow initiate the upload at the forum itself before it makes it to the storage/imagery DB-thingy? It seems like this would effectively eliminate duplicates and re-used images that are identical but would normally still occupy resources... seems pretty interesting.
Would the storage nodes have actual file-based images or some sort of encrypted/compressed copy?
And in terms of previously uploaded imgur images, if the intent would be to ultimately replace those links entirely with [cai]'s, it might still be best to keep some way to reference the original imgur link, in some fashion, to provide verification on top of whatever independent method is used.