Yes, a torrent system based on Datacoin would be amazing, even though there is other alternatives. It is worth it because it is raw data in the blockchain, not metadata.
I've started a year ago implementing torrent catalog inside Datacoin blockchain. You can see some drafts using oocook5u's datacoin-browser in testnet:
http://localhost:8080/dtc-testnet/get/ad4f39667cbdccc51da2bdbe857e036d62ee6240005d554ac614cddf8f1cc20d (wait until it will reach 21340th block). You need to run dtc-http-server.pl to check this.
I think this is the time to restart this work from scratch. Here is my proposal:
In order to have a censorship protected torrent catalog we have to store database that consists of entries of the following structure:
1. magnet link
2. creative work metadata (movie title, actors, ...)
3. torrent metadata (video quality, video length, codec, ...)
Creative work metadata are widely presented in the Web and I don't think we have to copy them into the blockchain. We can use linked data instead: links to wikidata/imdb/rottentomato/... and to other data we can download and parse easily.
Below is an example of such an entry created from TPB item (13127745/Star-Wars-Episode-V-The-Empire-Strikes-Back-1980-720p-6-1ch-BRRip-AAC-x264-GeekRG-Isohunt-to) with comments. I use JSON LD format and schema.org vocabulary. JSON LD seems to be a bit fat, schema.org needs to be extended for our task but I don't see better solution now.
{
// Header: this is a video and a pointer to vocabulary
"@type":"VideoObject",
"@context":{
"@vocab":"http://schema.org/"
},
// 1: Magnet link
"contentUrl":"magnet:?xt=urn:btih:e6a1247014fac644a6487687f1ce14f20eecabc3&dn=Star+Wars+Episode+V+-+The+Empire+Strikes+Back+%281980%29+720p+6.1ch+BRRip+AAC+x264+-+%5BGeekRG%5D+%5BIsohunt.to%5D&xl=1029974649&dl=1029974649&tr=udp://open.demonii.com:1337/announce&tr=udp://tracker.leechers-paradise.org:6969/announce&tr=udp://tracker.publicbt.com:80/announce&tr=udp://9.rarbg.com:2710/announce",
// 2: Creative work metadata: links to wikidata and imdb.
// There is no reason to copy them because it isn't likely
// they will be suddenly disappear from Web.
"encodesCreativeWork":[
{
"@type":"Movie",
"SameAs/wikidata":"Q181795",
"SameAs/imdb":"tt0080684"
}
],
// 3: Torrent metadata: here schema.org lacks of required properties.
// Missing properties have slashes in names.
"encodingFormat":"mpeg4",
"encodingFormat/videoCodec":"AVC",
"encodingFormat/frameRate":"23.976fps",
"encodingFormat/audioCodec":"HE-AAC",
"encodingFormat/audioRate":"48KHz",
"encodingFormat/audioChannels":"6",
"width":"1280",
"height":"544",
"inLanguage/audio":"en",
"inLanguage/subtitles":"en",
"Duration":"PT2H7M"
}
Technically this is enogh to rebuild a very rich media database on each PC having blockchain downloaded: all details can be requested from wikidata, imdb and other external sources.
User can browse and query such a database locally by title, actors' names, video quality, audio language etc. Clicking on magnet link he will start a download with his torrent client.
This work will require a lot of manual work to establish relations between magnet links and wikidata/imdb/rottentomatos/... databases because existing TPB data are very unstructured. Volunteers doing this work can be compensated in DTC by commutiny.
Any thoughts?
good idea, tough rating is needed for torrents.