If you are willing to spend money, there is no problem keeping content up with existing technology. Like always, blockchain solutions miss the problem entirely.
It would be nice not to shoot the messenger. The problem described by maksumur is a real problem people encounter often - torrents for less popular large files that people only occasionally want, but do want or need, have a habit of disappearing, or being non-functional when you do find a seed. Popularity plays too strong a role.
As far as I know the proof-of-data-availability folks (whether using a blockchain or not) are the only folks trying to solve this problem with a serious technical solution at a cost scale lower than "rent your own server and have deep pockets for bandwidth" at the moment.
It's not about "willing to spend money", as if there is only one threshold to pass.
Torrents are used largely because they diffuse the cost of hosting, so that people (and organisations) don't need deep pockets to distribute large files to many others. There is an inevitable infrastructure cost but it's spread out more fairly among users.
The proof-of-data-availability stuff is similar, but takes it further so that a wider range of data stays publically available to whoever wants to download it, whenever they want, than it otherwise would be. It is really just a more fancy version of torrenting that is less prone to the excessive per-file popularity fluctuations that torrents suffer from. The objective is to lower costs compared with the current state of the internet, not add more. And it does not specifically require a blockchain.
If you know of something else tackling the problem I'd be love to hear about it. Torrent seed sites don't qualify, as they don't solve the problem: Most files aren't available on them either, and you have to pay for the more obscure content they do have.
No, that still misses the mark entirely. We are in a thread about archive.org's server being hit too hard, someone proposed they should offer distributed downloads via torrent, and someone commented asking for "a way to keep them alive regardless of interest".
You are proposing a system based on financial rewards for hosting. Who pays those rewards, for those files in which there is no interest? If archive.org is to pay for it, we are back to square one. They are already very good at hosting content, within the limits of the resources they have. If people with an interest in downloading the files pay for it, no go, files with no interest go away. If you propose that people currently abusing the free service of archive.org, to the point of bringing it down, would pay a fee per download, you must be joking.
> You are proposing a system based on financial rewards for hosting.
No, I'm not. You are incorrectly assuming that blockchains are necessarily financial or that cryptoeconomic incentive structure involves net pay to someone.
> If you propose that people currently abusing the free service of archive.org, to the point of bringing it down, would pay a fee per download, you must be joking.
I'm not proposing that.
People "pay" for hosting by participating in some amount of upload to offset their download, in order to be granted higher download rates. That is the same principle as BitTorrent has used since its inception: Upload is measured and download is traded for upload to ensure users choose to upload for a while.
The difference is that information is split and diffused in a different way, which ensure that some amount of upload bandwidth and temporary storage is available for less popular data as long as there are people participating in the network, mostly when they are downloading something more popular and providing some upload in exchange. The network power law helps by ensuring the long tail of less popular content needs relatively little "extra" bandwidth so it is not onerous on the users who, most of the time, are downloading and storing popular data.
No money needs to be involved.
Probably some financial things will emerge much like paid Torrent sites do at the moment for enhanced access which some people prefer. You can't prevent them, but they are not required for the network's operation nor required to access it.
