I would consider operating a listing should people want to pool resources together and mine litecoins.

Is there enough people around still interested in investing to make doing so worthwhile following the recent drama surrounding assets and exchanges - I dunno.

Hi - Im interested. Will buy 5 for £38.00

Are you on bitcoin-otc?

PM me to proceed. Thanks.

I think what you may be asking for is Freenet - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freenet - with its distributed encrypted data store.

i don't think that solves any of the problems he's asking about matthew.

this is a really cool idea! mods, can we move this thread somewhere else, so that it can be seen by relevant people?

Hello everyone:

I have watched with some amazement the development of the Bitcoin project, especially admiring its technical properties and achievements. A rather off-topic side-project has recently popped into my head, which I would now like to publicly propose. It seems that, all cryptographic currency properties aside, the most interesting development of the entire project is the blockchain itself, and its distributed (and distributed-verified) database system. What has been considered about its application in other areas? The strong censorship resistance of the distributed blockchain model seems ideal in some ways for distribution of "forbidden" sites and data. As the subject implies, The Pirate Bay seems like a viable candidate for such a mechanism, if only as a proof of concept.

So to the Bitcoin technical team, and anyone interested, I ask the following questions:

1: Is it first of all conceivable for a presently dynamic web site like The Pirate Bay, to be created as a desktop app, and to have its entire database distributed and verified across thousands of computers, blockchain style?

2: What metadata could and should be reasonably and sensibly added to the blockchain, keeping in mind that with each torrent on The Pirate Bay you have: magnet link, description, comments, possibly an image, some user id, a time stamp and possibly more.

3: Could dynamic updating of content work in the same way? For example if someone wanted to add a torrent to the pool, how, in the blockchain style, might it be able to be flagged as good or bad?

4: As an addition to the above question, what could be done to dilute pollution to the blockchain (and its subsequent bloating in size), by parties interested in destroying the project?

5: What components that are currently a part of the main Bitcoin client and protocol that would absolutely not be necessary for this? I presume that various things about the transactions are unnecessary, but perhaps for the security of the network the need only be re-purposed?

Thank you very much for your time!

But Hundi is for money transfer.  Ripple is for lending and borrowing.

Or are you thinking how this can make it so a Hundi operator can work alone?  i.e., receive cash from the sender then pushes payment to the recipient through ripple (where the recipient gets cash from someone local)?

There will be overlap between Ripple networks and Hundi operator networks but eventually there's simply going to be no need for Hundi / Hawalders -- between Bitcoin and Ripple there's no additional value they can add?

 - http://opencoin.com  <-- Now Ripple.com

We envision communications infrastructure that is owned and operated cooperatively, by the whole of humanity, rather than by corporations and states.
We are using the power of peer-to-peer technologies to create a global network which is resistant to censorship and breakdown.
We promote freedoms, support innovations and advocate technologies that enhance and enable digital self-determination.

Ripple is an open-source software project for developing and implementing a protocol for an open decentralized payment network. In its developed form (it is not substantially implemented), the Ripple network would be a peer-to-peer distributed social network service with a monetary honour system based on trust that already exists between people in real-world social networks; this form is financial capital backed completely by social capital.
Contents  [hide]
1 Background
2 Principle
3 Comparison with existing payment systems
4 See also
5 References
6 External links
[edit]Background

Modern monetary systems are built on obligations of the participants to each other. Cash and bonds are government obligations, and loan agreements are the personal obligations of borrowers. Bank account balances are bank obligations, backed by borrower and government obligations. For an obligation to have value, the holder must trust that the issuer can supply that value. Thus the banking network can be described as a trust network.
The primary method of making payment to another participant in the system is by transferring ownership of bank obligations electronically over a chain of accounts in the banking network from payer to recipient. The banking network is essentially hierarchical, with banks acting as sole intermediary between its account-holders, and central banks acting as sole intermediary between banks. This structure means that it is simple to route payments to and from any participants, but is inherently full of single points of failure, which may also be characterized as single points of control.
[edit]Principle

The core idea of Ripple is that it should be possible to route payments through an open, arbitrary trust network, similar to how the internet routes packets of data through an open, arbitrary computer network. The advantages of such a system would be that it wouldn't be reliant on a small decision-making body at the center to set monetary policy for the entire nation; instead, it would be set in a more democratic fashion by all participants, and in theory be more responsive to regional and community needs. There would be no need for a tightly regulated institutional trust hierarchy to control the behaviour of those participants near the center: like the internet, but unlike the existing global monetary system, the Ripple network would be designed to weather the collapse of a large number of its nodes.
Note that the Ripple protocol itself wouldn't preclude a hierarchical payment structure evolving, it just allows for the possibility of other structures.
Put another way, Ripple is a system of free banking that separates the payment routing function from the credit aggregation function.
[edit]Comparison with existing payment systems

Other alternative (to standard public clearing houses such as ACH) payment/monetary systems already exist, including internet currencies such as Bitcoin and Ven, currency networks like KlickEx, or local currencies such as LETS. Ripple is fundamentally different from hierarchical models in that it provides a level playing field that treats all participants equally. Both PayPal and LETS are modelled on a single central authority that issues obligations based on its policy and handles the accounting of payments between leaf nodes. In Ripple, no node has any greater or lesser capability than any other node – this is acknowledgement that every participant in a debt-based monetary system does in fact issue their own currency (or obligations). A node's connectedness in Ripple is based on the trust of the other participants and nothing else.
In a sense, every Ripple node is like a LETS or a PayPal unto itself. Ripple could be used to connect existing alternative and mainstream payment systems into a single network.

It probably isn't the cost of the phone that is excessively prohibitive, but the cost of the Internet/web mobile data service on top of voice/text.  Fortunately, these smartphones are functional with just a Wi-Fi connection and no mobile data service is needed.  (I'm presuming a person can use a smartphone but only subscribe to standard voice/text, or maybe not, I'm not sure.)  If merchant and local exchange agents can provide Wi-Fi (at the least for accessing the blockchain or for web-based Bitcoin EWallets) then not every Bitcoin user with one of these smartphones ends up having to pay for Internet/web data subscriptions.  But still a £40 device used just for use as a digital currency wallet is not going to foster wide adoption.

Ah yeah I've heard of that before and I am very very interested in the project, Thank you for taking the time to suggest that to me, maybe one day when i have some extra cash to spend I will setup a node for my small town, but for now I will propose on figuring out how to make the incentive to put up a node with Bitcoins

A properly executed freedombox platform could allow folks to seamlessly exchange bitcoins (or other value stores) for bandwidth, or any other service conceivable. A true peer-to-peer economy.

I think Bitcoin + Decentralized Internet would basically be awesome, i Just can't figure out how that would work off the top of meh head.

My idea is to send a packet of data to my neighbor with the intent of it reaching to the next town over.
The packet would contain some low BTC amount inside it like 0.0005 BTC so my neighbor takes 0.000001 BTC for taking the time, energy, resources to facilitate my needs to get that packet sent to the appropriate destination. This would happen with every node with my destination receiving BTC until no BTC left. I don't know how I would calculate how many btc each node would get or the success of the packet reaching there.

Perhaps every node can send "free" packets for the sake of collecting IP routing table lists and locations and an agreement of the cost of each node, once the list is established the packet can be calculated it's cost and pick the route of least resistance(not too low on BTC node code but not entirely high but more on the low side). Once a line is considered the networking packet will be sent along with the multi-sig BTC transaction, each node checks the transaction from the Blockchain and verifies it before sending off the traffic(Assuming its computationally feasible to do this in the future). once that node sees that the multi-sig transaction is there (with its bitcoin address related to the transaction) it can send off the packet of data to the next node, each node does this until the last node confirms and then the Bitcoins are released to each node simultaneously once the packet reaches its destination.

Some other thoughts...
I could check up on the status of a packet with the security of the block chain too

Thoughts?

*Fixed some spelling issues, grammer stuff

Why would a company like pyramining go with alts if they can keep up in the bitcoin mining and are designing there own ASIC, really makes no sense at all.