It's insane to me that in 2008 a bunch of pervs decentralized storage and made hentai@home to host hentai comics. Yet here we are almost 20 years later and we haven't generalized this solution. Yes I'm aware of the privacy issues h@h has (as a hoster you're exposing your real IP and people reading comics are exposing their IP to you) but those can be solved with tunnels, the real value is the redundant storage.
The illegal side of hosting, sharing, and mirroring technology, as it were, is much more free to chase technical excellence at all costs.
There are lessons to be learned in that. For example, for that population, bandwidth efficiency and information leakage control invite solutions that are suboptimal for an organization that would build market share on licensing deals and growth maximization.
Without an overriding commercial growth directive you also align development incentives differently.
I was hopeful a few years ago when I heard of chia coin, that it would allow distributed internet storage for a price.
Users upload their encrypted data to miners, along with a negotiated fee for a duration of storage, say 90d. They take specific hashes of the complete data, and some randomized sub hashes, of internal chunks. Periodically an agent requests these chunks, hashes and rewards a fraction of the payment of the hash is correct.
That's a basic sketch, more details would have to be settled. But "miners" would be free to delete data if payment was no longer available on a chain. Or additionally, they could be paid by downloaders instead of uploaders for hoarding more obscure chunks that aren't widely available.
