I've been thinking about this. Let's say we have a small html file, which loads the javascript torrent library. You keep this file on your desktop (and give it to friends), maybe even bookmark it to make it easier to open.
The javascript fires off, accesses a torrent (hard-coded into the html itself), which loads content for the website... images, js files, everything. It also loads the data (I'm assuming it's small, but I've read claims that the data is only about 90 megs) into javascript storage, ready to be searched locally.
The torrent swarm itself could become so big that it'd be self-sustaining, no original seeders would need to stay online vulnerable to legal threats.
To have the torrent continually update with new content, you'd have to break the protocol (which, for this one purpose, might not be bad). But I don't understand it well enough to know this is even possible for certain. With magnet links, you first have to download the whole torrent file before you can start downloading, and it may not be possible to coax it into get the updated torrent file again.
Even if you can't do that, updates themselves might just be new torrents... we can run javascript on this page, so we can be clever and have it derive new torrents/hashes to download. It would be good if anyone could update the data, for instance, adding torrents (though how to police that so they don't add junk or poison the thing... not sure).
The issue is that BitTorrent as a protocol converts hashes into files, but it's got no mechanism to associate a hash with some other identity. That means you don't need trust to operate it, but conversely there's no way make changes to a torrent after it's been seeded.
A system like Bitcoin+BitTorrent could do what you're describing, with Bitcoin filling in the missing distributed hash identification function. I don't really follow the distributed web scene, but I'm sure that's an area of active research.
The javascript fires off, accesses a torrent (hard-coded into the html itself), which loads content for the website... images, js files, everything. It also loads the data (I'm assuming it's small, but I've read claims that the data is only about 90 megs) into javascript storage, ready to be searched locally.
The torrent swarm itself could become so big that it'd be self-sustaining, no original seeders would need to stay online vulnerable to legal threats.
To have the torrent continually update with new content, you'd have to break the protocol (which, for this one purpose, might not be bad). But I don't understand it well enough to know this is even possible for certain. With magnet links, you first have to download the whole torrent file before you can start downloading, and it may not be possible to coax it into get the updated torrent file again.
Even if you can't do that, updates themselves might just be new torrents... we can run javascript on this page, so we can be clever and have it derive new torrents/hashes to download. It would be good if anyone could update the data, for instance, adding torrents (though how to police that so they don't add junk or poison the thing... not sure).