I too dream of such a thing. Personally, I want the idea where you pay bitcoins to the entire network, the payment gets split by the percentage of storage.
Webmasters would pay the network (and have an API to generate download links, upload authorization for users to upload directly to the network), giving users the ability to use it for free or can pay directly to the network too, or even get a premium account on the website for convinence.
I don't care about the other ideas bit451 has suggested (playlists, hashtags, etc), I think the network should be for resilient file storage and for videos people can build an application on top of that network.
I'd love to switch to a network rather than rely on a single datacenter which can be raided over night. A 'Usenet for HTTP'.
I've heard of Tahoe-LAFS before, I am under the impression it's for when I own the storage server rather than using a network of other peoples server? My dream is of a network of other people operating the servers for both liability reasons and it would be cheaper because given a network of people paying with bitcoin, it would be oversold, reducing the price more than getting a dedicated server (assuming there is competition).
If I'm wrong, and other people provide storage with Tahoe-LAFS, how are you recieving money for it? Storage is expensive when done on enterprise scale, we can't rely on peoples open internet idiology for something as expensive as that.
The original technology Tahoe-LAFS is based upon (MojoNation) also spawned BitTorrent. For BT Bram removed the secure tunnels (a la Tor) and the distributed payment system. Over the past decade we have just slowly added it all back and at each step proclaimed ourselves to be rather clever...
Webmasters would pay the network (and have an API to generate download links, upload authorization for users to upload directly to the network), giving users the ability to use it for free or can pay directly to the network too, or even get a premium account on the website for convinence.
I don't care about the other ideas bit451 has suggested (playlists, hashtags, etc), I think the network should be for resilient file storage and for videos people can build an application on top of that network.
I'd love to switch to a network rather than rely on a single datacenter which can be raided over night. A 'Usenet for HTTP'.