> I borrow books constantly from the IA that are hard/impossible to find elsewhere because they've gone out of print. A lot of academic-ish non-fiction from the 1960s-1980s, stuff you can only otherwise get through inter-library loan that takes weeks rather than seconds.
This is the one use case where the blockchain/web3 is useful.
Give me a decentralized library on the blockchain, where no government can take it down by merely discovering the host's identity and location. Invulnerable to rubber-hose attacks and censorship (which IPFS is still vulnerable to.)
Blockchains don't really do this well though. A blockchain is useful when you need a publicly accessible, canonical shared record of a consensus, obfuscated or otherwise. They're not for storing arbitrary data. If you want to store arbitrary data, and you want peer to peer decentralized kind of features and you want identities obfuscated, currently you're looking at BitTorrent over Tor. I don't know if i2p or Tor or anyone else is working on any sort of swarm like file sharing internally over those networks, but it needs to be done and these shadow libraries need to begin using it.
Blockchains can absolutely be used for storing arbitrary data (see Filecoin.)
Torrents cannot be updated. Whether done over Tor or not, they aren't suitable for this use case, especially as you have to chase down the websites that advertise them, as they constantly get banned.
What you need is a distributed append-only data structure. Blockchains are an example, but not the only way to do this.
Filecoin doesn't store data on the blockchain. Filecoin is a blockchain payment network for a monetized IPFS storage network. The two were developed in concert, IPFS was built for filecoin.
IPFS is more popular on it's own than with filecoin I'll point out, off topic.
But you can use blockchains for arbitrary data, there's nothing preventing you from doing it. It's just a bad idea, everyone has to have every copy of everything anyone might want.
Torrents over Tor fall short, Torrents fall short in general I agree. An IPFS type network native to i2p or Tor, internal with no exit, is probably the way to go, unfortunately to my knowledge it does not exist.
IPFS has some theoretical merits, such as not relying on discrete trackers (which is a point of failure), and at present we have a bunch of mirrors that speeds it up. However, BitTorrent has a better track record regarding resilience against interference (from copyright mafia) or other bad actors. IPFS has so far not openly supported this usage.
I personally don't think it's necessary, but the Blockchain creates an effectively irreversible collectivization of the work: Removal would also undo whatever other work was committed.
It's kind of like cryptographically amortized hostage taking... Erase my book, and the pickle ball championships NFT gets it...
Torrents cannot be updated. Furthermore, torrents are subject to the sites that advertise them getting banned. You will constantly be on the hunt for new trackers.
Blockchain is an obviously superior application here as new books and articles are constantly being released.
That's not neccesarily a bad thing. Once you release something you shouldn't be able to gaslight people by silently updating it - instead, release a new verson with a new torrent.
This was going to be my next question with basic assumption that the entire gathered information will either vanish, get moved to torrents or splintered across various believers of the cause.
Try Library Genesis: https://libgen.is/