You're thinking legality, but I'm thinking efficiency. So we can now distribute 1.5 million torrents (of a total of several thousand TBs, no doubt) in a file 90MB big, in a torrent which itself has a magnet address that takes up...20 bytes?
The size savings as you go up the tree are incredible. I see no reason why you couldn't create an almost-entirely distributed torrent site in this way.
Think about: Torrent discovery could be done by regular distribution of index torrents, and the clients use that to find out what can be downloaded and where.
In fact, in the world of magnet addresses, "uploading" a torrent would be as simple as requesting that its URI be put in the day's index. So running a torrent site would be as simple as curating a list of magnet URIs each day into an index, then publishing that torrent's URI somewhere. Like Twitter. You could run a torrent site entirely from Twitter.
edonkey has had distributed search for a long time. It's possible to maintain an keyword index of magnet links in a dht, and then you remove the need for the torrent site completely.
I think that requiring torrent files and trackers was a policy decision to deflect liability away from the client implementer to multiple third parties. That's why bit torrent is still around and Grokster isn't. There's no technical need for them.
BitTorrent has torrent files and trackers because it was designed for non-infringing use-cases (e.g. distributing Knoppix images). The centralized elements substantially improve reliability (and, at the time, performance) in those use-cases.
You're thinking legality, but I'm thinking efficiency. So we can now distribute 1.5 million torrents (of a total of several thousand TBs, no doubt) in a file 90MB big, in a torrent which itself has a magnet address that takes up...20 bytes?
The size savings as you go up the tree are incredible. I see no reason why you couldn't create an almost-entirely distributed torrent site in this way.
Think about: Torrent discovery could be done by regular distribution of index torrents, and the clients use that to find out what can be downloaded and where.
In fact, in the world of magnet addresses, "uploading" a torrent would be as simple as requesting that its URI be put in the day's index. So running a torrent site would be as simple as curating a list of magnet URIs each day into an index, then publishing that torrent's URI somewhere. Like Twitter. You could run a torrent site entirely from Twitter.