this post was submitted on 02 Jul 2026
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It's tough. The problem is that, on the tech side, technically, torrents don't have to seed. People have made fake torrent clients that only pretend to seed, but actually only download. The IP's are detected and then banned, but it's a cat and mouse game.
Enforcing it with backups is a similar struggle. There exist paid solutions, that use crypto to pay for decentralized storage. You "rent" out some of your storage, or by some using crypto. Filecoin, sia, storj, and so on.
But these have flaws too. Often, there level of decentralization is questionable, and the maker of the crypto takes a cut, plus there are issues with using a custom crypto coin as well. The coin's value can fluctuate — there are challenges with it simultaneously be an investment, AND a currency, but that's what often happens.
A better solution, is just to trade hard drives with your friends, who you know in person. Or maybe trust online, at least. Just give them an encrypted backup. And then they give you an encrypted backup.
In my opinion "encrypted, decentralized backups", is the kind of problem that is extremely difficult to solve technically, but is trivially solved via touching grass. I don't really like the technical solutions people have presented to this problem, and a local community is a much simpler way to solve these challenges.
They're doing it wrong. You don't pretend to seed. That's stupid.
You establish a swarm then disconnect the tracker and leech without regret.
Then magically you have 100 percent of something. You fix the tracker. Now you're legitimately seeding. If anyone asks, your friend sent you the files to help you seed it ... to be good guy Greg, obviously.
That was one way I was thinking to handle this. As I don't have friends, I had to think of some other ones.
One way to confirm participation is to require participants to regularly calculate and send to other hosts hashes of stored chunks + random strings that were generated by the chunk owner in advance and were unknown to the peer before a given point in time. They would confirm to the network they still have the file daily, if they won't verify it for 14 days other peers would be liberated from an obligation to store files they uploaded.
Can you use family or work as an offsite instead? You only need to leave a drive in a drawer somewhere and swap it around intermittently.
Troublesome; can't be automated.