ZeroNet: Decentralized websites using Bitcoin crypto and BitTorrent network

By the way, I assume it’s possible to copy “sample apps” (such as ZeroTalk, the forum) to one’s site.
Are there instructions on how to do that? I looked at the docs and Github, didn’t find them.

I can make a car out of my kids trike, my lawn mower and my dog’s kennel. I would have something working relatively quickly. It wouldn’t win any awards for performance or refinement though.

Different approaches have different merits. Safe net uses various libraries and gets re-use this way.

Suggesting that maidsafe chose a worse approach is misleading.

?
I suggested that MaidSafe chose a different, not wrong, approach. Each has its merits.

An optional (by default disabled) plugin like that would be great (check if the address burned at least 0.0X (up to site owner) BTC before you allow it to comment). Spammers are not beneficial to the network in any stage.

It’s really simple: create a new site using zeronet.py siteCreate, then copy every file from the other site you want to copy.

To make it even easier there is a also built-in clone feature: https://twitter.com/HelloZeroNet/status/656246467636690944

Yeah it’s a good idea, it would be also nice to make the username registration on blockchain, but I have not found any cryptocurrency provide this and has fullnode-less, SPV validation.

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Another win for the decentralized movement

:stuck_out_tongue:

I’m playing on the pre SAFE Network now

No anonymity baked in the network, no good IMO. Tor shouldn’t be used for these types of payloads and VPN is not user friendly (not to mention it seems most places w/ good bandwidth can be subpoenaed or pressured). Also, doesn’t have good plausible deniability. I have no doubt once the 1MB limit is raised that a popcorn time clone will be built on safe that will provide anonymity for both publishers and consumers (instead of just publishers).

Let’s revisit that once SAFE is out.

At the moment SAFE is not out yet, so it’s less meaningful to compare something that’s available now vs. something that isn’t (if you say SAFE is available, fine, but then you can use the same opportunity to compare plausible deniability and anonymity features of the current SAFE MVP vs. ZeroNet).

Tor is certainly slowish (I get 50-200 KB, which is probably enough for video streaming, but it wouldn’t scale if everyone tried to do it). However personally I am not interested in high-bandwidth apps and (see below) most users probably aren’t either.

Of course that would be valuable… when it becomes available.

In the meantime take a look at OpenParasite.co - there’s a bunch of Torrent streaming sites already and outside of the US people can watch them with impunity. And it’s “free” (of course it’s not really, you get ads and maybe malware with the movies/music, but 90% of people don’t give two craps about that).

ZeroNet and Popcorn are free, which means the price is unbeatable. The only reason Popcorn users might want to use SAFE is privacy, but that is a concern mostly for US based users. In the rest of the world you can watch anything in your browser, without installing any software.

ZeroNet + Tor is fine for low bandwidth, private and public content such as forums, blogging and so on, and it works today.
SAFE can be better for some other things, like high bandwidth apps and reliable content repositories, archiving, etc.
There’s no reason why people wouldn’t use the both.

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That seems contrary to the video-based applications that are popular these days.

This kind of thinking (disregard for anonymity) based on trust in your location is a fallacy. Even if you aren’t worried about state actors (a dangerous thing even if you have a modicum of trust in them where you are), there are many other areas that lack of anonymity can cause problems. The post I responded to was about streaming video, not about low bandwidth (of course there are many low bandwidth options, zeronet probably provides very little over hidden services here).

While of course having a shipped product is valuable, it doesn’t mean it’s not worth contrasting with safe on the safe forum. It’s less important whether standard users care about anonymity (even though words you use like “most” and “90%” seem made up), but whether more protection can be provided without additional friction. Things like Tribler have also tried similar approaches with disappointing bandwidth speeds.

Well it is and it isn’t. What I tried to point out is that you can go to torrentstreaming.com (just googled it, didn’t visit the site) and watch torrents without downloading them.
This works for 80% of the world (i.e. pretty much everywhere except the US and maybe some parts of the EU).
No PIN, no password, no registration, no installation, etc. - it’s pretty much Click and Play as I described on that (openparasite) post linked in previous comment.

So yes, there is demand for video streaming, but it’s easily satisfied by dozens of those sites that are ad-sponsored.

Where will the average (high school or below) user from Africa or Asia go to watch movies and what are the criteria used to make a choice? It’s the ease of use and access. Meaning, the Web.

Those who use SAFE and find it very valuable in the 3rd world will be “the text people” (I can’t help but chuckle when I remember the geniuses from this forum who want to subsidize the richest and best educated (even if they’re oppressed dissidents) just because they use SAFE from Africa).

Where I am they don’t bust you for watching American movies - they couldn’t care less about that (in fact it is still seen as a way of “saving money” to the country).
They bust you for downloading specific words put in specific order. Mere kilobytes of text. That’s what governments don’t want to see.

Yes, and how much protection do you need to watch the latest Oscar winning movies in Cambodia or Somailia? None.
Now think how much friction there is in clicking on a torrent-streaming link in Chrome vs. using either ZeroNet and SAFE for those same users, most of who don’t even speak a foreign language (which is why sites that host .srt files are very popular - because of torrents).

It’s fine to compare anything you want, but I’ll challenge the comparison if it compares a feature set that hasn’t been yet delivered with something that works now. Why don’t you compare the two roadmaps - ZeroNet features scheduled for Q2 and MaidSafe’s roadmap for H1/2016? That’d be fair.

Here is the latest article on ZeroNet Published March 4th:

“Project Maelstrom does not allow to create dynamic or multi-user websites, and it’s not open-source,” he noted. “MaidSafe --as far as I know --is more focused on file storage.”

Read more: http://www.nasdaq.com/article/bittorrent-powered-zeronet-decentralized-web-pioneers-peer-to-peer-file-transfers-cm588385#ixzz427s0sk3M

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I’m shocked that nasdaq.com has this type of content. Nice find.

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Said thing is, I’d never heard of Zeronet before and was only doing a google search for Maidsafe articles. This one was one of the 1st to come up even though it only has that one negative line.

Zeronet is amazing piece of technology. Surely, it isn’t anonymous. BUT that can be fixed with slight changes.

Put in I2P. I2P has the best anonymous file sharing (torrent) to date. Zeronet will fit perfectly inside of I2P network. Not only that, I2P speeds increases as more users uses I2P. I2P request you to put your bandwidth into the network. It is a proof of bandwidth. Meanwhile, safenet request you to put your resources into the network. It is a proof of resources.
github issue.

Edited:

I just recently found out they just put in TOR. This is really bad idea. Tor is not build to be use torrents, nor file sharing. zeronet is going hog the tor network.
Github issue

Isn’t that just a matter of setting up a route on I2P?

Tor2Tor can work fine.

Tor devs explicitly said do not build file sharing torrents inside of tor network. It will bring the entire network down. It is NOT build for that. Anybody who read the whitepaper and documents will understand WHY it is not meant for that purpose. Tor purpose is encryption messaging communications, and server-client communications. That’s it!

I2P is really straight forward. All they did was encrypt the upload tunnels, and download tunnels. And then reroute the tunnels by doing multiple hops which is quite similar to maidsafe multiple hops. This design fits perfectly for zeronet.

Don’t recall seeing that advice. I saw the advice about bad privacy for concurrent seeding and Tor use.

I2P wasn’t designed for creating proxies to the Internet so if there are Zeronet users out there who do not use I2P, the bottleneck becomes this Internet link.

My personal performance requirements are simple, not interested in high speed access, so either of these work for me.

That’s the point! No one should be using exit nodes! That defeats entire purpose of using tor, and i2p. Stay inside of the network, and you’re golden.

I don’t think that is necessarily the case.
A nice thing about Zeronet is that you can have a free web site on a P2P network.

Some people prefer to use BitTorrent for P2P replication and aren’t interested about enhanced privacy (apparently there is enough of them so that BitTorrent created an entire product (Maelstrom) that can’t work any other way).

Others may want enhanced privacy and that’s the group that wants either Tor or I2P. In that groups some folks don’t care about clearnet integration so they prefer I2P, while others do, so they prefer Tor.

If you use I2P all your linked WWW content becomes dead, so I you want to load some Web news, FB status updates, or the current MAID exchange rate, you are out of luck. Also you lose all peering / cache that exists on clearweb. Some people don’t like that, others do. For regular sites without large file downloads, it is unlikely those will be faster than clearweb Zeronet because in foreseeable future there will be more Zeronet clients on clearweb and Tor than I2P.

https://www.youtube.com/results?sp=EgIIBQ%253D%253D&q=zeronet

It’s nothing to “like” about Ethereum, they got a ton of money in crowdsale and they’ve burned a boatload to market it to newcomers (while selling their ETH, lol).

By the way, I read a recent interview with the main Zeronet guy and some recent news - now there’s around 1,000 active users and a large chunk is from China.

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Here’s a great new podcast with @nofish!

Steal This Show S02E01: Zeronet

In this first episode of our new season, we interview Tamas Kocsis, the founder and developer Zeronet.

https://media.blubrry.com/stealthisshow/p/content.blubrry.com/stealthisshow/S02_E01_Zeronet_with_Tamas_Kocsis.mp3

Also, if you haven’t used ZeroNet recently, I would highly recommend downloading the latest version and creating an account on ZeroMe, a new social network for ZeroNet.

The interface of ZeroMe looks great and it works really well :smiley:

More info here: New ZeroNet version: 0.4.0 + ZeroMe decentralized, P2P social site

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