webtorrent VS bittorrent-dht

It's because of the kind of content that is shared. BitTorrent serves a lot of content you are not allowed to redistribute, so having an open gateway immediately puts you at risk of aiding the distribution of content. But it does work, someone even made something native to browsers so browsers themselves can share content: https://webtorrent.io/. There are even fuse "gateways" to make it native to your computer and pretend the files exist locally: https://github.com/search?q=bittorrent+fuse&type=repositorie...

IPFS doesn't seem to be used for that kind of content much, it seems to be targeted more towards web-native content (html pages, images, that kind of stuff). It's probably safer for Cloudflare to run this.

title. I have some experience with c++ but not much with torrent libraries. (webtorrent, stremio)

You can stream torrents

If it fits your model, WebTorrent[0] can offload a lot of bandwidth to peers.

[0] https://github.com/webtorrent/webtorrent

Then https://github.com/webtorrent/webtorrent could be used to actually download the videos in browser, the idea being here though, that you would at least seed out as much as you got. Enabling other's to access videos without requiring creators have the infrastructure to push a video to 1000s or more clients at once.

I assume you've seen https://webtorrent.io/ ?

I'm not talking about the consensus protocol of the blockchain itself, but of the p2p algorithms underlying it, e.g. using Kademlia for service discovery and message routing. I'm asking why a distributed system would choose something like Consul (which uses Raft, and requires a coordinator node) instead of running a decentralized protocol like Kademlia (which has no coordinator nodes) within their distributed single-tenant environment.

I did a bit more research last night, and discovered that Bitfinex actually does something like this internally (anyone know if this is up to date?) [0] — they built a service discovery mesh by storing arbitrary data on a DHT implementing BEP44 (using webtorrent/bittorrent-dht [1]).

This seems pretty cool to me, and IMO any modern distributed system should consider running decentralized protocols to benefit from their robustness properties. Deploying a node to a decentralized protocol requires no coordination or orchestration, aside from it simply joining the network. Scaling a service is as simple as joining a node to the network and announcing its availability of an implementation of that service.

At first glance, this looks like a competitive advantage, because it decouples the operational and maintenance costs of the network from the size of the network.

So I'm wondering if there is a consistent tradeoff in exchange for this robustness — are decentralized applications more complex to implement but simpler to operate? Is latency of decentralized protocols (e.g. average number of hops to lookup item in a DHT) untenably higher than that of distributed protocols (e.g. one hop once to get instructions from coordinator, then one hop to lookup item in distributed KV)? Does a central coordinator eliminate some kind of principle agent problem, resulting in e.g. a more balanced usage of the hashing keyspace?

Decentralization emerged because distributed solutions fail in untrusted environments — but this doesn't mean that decentralized solutions fail in trusted environments. So why not consider more decentralized protocols to scale internal systems?

[0] https://github.com/bitfinexcom/grenache

[1] https://github.com/webtorrent/bittorrent-dht

Yes the database is fixed. I would like to make it updateable using web2web or mutable torrents (BEP44) which the WebTorrent DHT supports.