Bitcoin Forum

What do you think of having a p2p app that would be storing images from Google Streetview into a distributed blockchain database?
Peers would be crawling Google Streetview and storing it all in a p2p fashion. Google Earth was deprecated. But there is still Google Maps and Streetview.

Storing those images in a P2P fashion something like Torrents seems fine for whatever your use case is but don't know how or why blockchain would be a necessity here? What problem are we trying to solve by introducing blockchain?  Maybe you should elaborate a bit more on your use-case. How does one make use of those stored images anyway? You can't compile them again into a 360 street view?

Yes, maybe .torrents make more sense. There is no need for a blockchain nor timestamping.

Thanks.

I agree, there is no need for timestamping.

yeah but why not blockchain? If there is no need of something, it should not be that we don't use. A website can be created in simple HTML then why don't we see most of the website created on HTML alone? If you are building this, I would suggest why not give it a try on blockchain? It will be a talk of interest as it is on blockchain while on p2p like torrent, it will become just mere application.

What would be the incentive for the peers to store images and data on their own servers/computers?
Are they going to get paid?Google Earth doesn't generate any revenue.Any idea about how such project can generate revenue?Ads shown here and there might do the work,but the user experience will suffer from this.

For coin related blockchains this would mean to pollute the blockchain with several gigabytes of useless (for many) data. And it won't be cheap either, and also cumbersome, since most coins have very small space for extra info.

Imho archive websites are best suited for the job, although they're centralized.
If you want decentralized manner, you'll probably have to pay for the data size and the time you store it and you can look at Filecoin and other similar networks.

Then another open point will be crawling that data in a way to somehow duplicate it for storage. Does such a tool exist? I don't know of any.
Then another open point can be licensing/duplication rights. There's a good chance Google/Alphabet won't be happy about your idea.

Same way how they are making money out of google maps (https://support.google.com/google-ads/answer/7040605?hl=en), and there is a lot of money.
But the whole blockchain thing is just useless at this point, it will take such huge resources to store all the data in full nodes it will be decentralized only in name, in reality, there will be just a few servers with a full copy of it.


None, but this is the trend now, everything needs to be done via a blockchain, the madness will strat again just like in 2017 when there was a blockchain project for every activity known to man.  The old SETI@home would do far better than any blockchain for this, there are a few websites that use it combined with bittorrent serving millions of pictures a day for years, one of them, the notorious ehentai is currently doing 11Gb/s in trafic, pretty impressive for just pictures.

Because the competition demands a GREAT, robust, progressive user interface, and user experience which HTML can't provide alone. Would you rather want a website that works on mobile or looks all broken on a mobile? You see there is that user demand. In OP's use case, there is no such demand for blokchain.

That sucks because there won't really be an engineering approach to solve a problem.