Disclaimer

This document should serve as nothing more than an exercise in exploring the opportunities of rebuilding the What.CD platform on top of Ethereum and IPFS/Swarm. These technologies are very young and the pieces to pull something together may not even be there yet. This document might help fill in the gaps or at least outline what needs to happen to make this a possibility.

Requirements

In order to understand the rest of this document, you’ll need to have a basic to advanced knowledge about how Ethereum, IPFS, DHT and Smart Contracts work. If you don’t understand the fundamentals of these protocols and technologies, most of this document will be over your head.

Objective(s)

With the sudden shutdown of our beloved What.CD and the massive amount of work lost, it’s hit home pretty hard for a large group of folks online who put a ton of effort inputting, curating, researching, developing, discussing etc. our community.

The objective of this document is to start the discussion around what we can do to:

1. Recreate the essential pieces of What.CD
2. Ensure the decentralization of these pieces
3. Rethink the entire system for the future

Breaking Down What.CD

At the core, What.CD was a massive music index that housed millions (literally) of torrents and the metadata associated with them. I don’t think there’s a database out there public or private that matched the amount of hand curated content that What.CD had.

The wiki, discussion board/forum, chat, etc were sort of ancillary to the core part of What.CD. Those components could exist out on the current web without much fear of take downs, illegal activity, etc. For the time being, we should probably rely on centralized solutions for those pieces since there’s little to gain from decentralizing those.

Getting back to the core, there are pieces we need to decentralize. First is the transport layer.

Transport Layer

I’ve looked into IPFS and Swarm as two possible candidates for actually moving files around. IPFS is much more mature than Swarm, but it exists outside of the Ethereum platform, though it dovetails pretty nicely. Swarm, on the other hand, is in early alpha stage. I have a feeling that Swarm and IPFS may end up being the same codebase. I know the two communities are working very closely together.

Running a tracker is no longer a viable way to move forward. Yes, the files are P2P, but you still need the tracker and when that goes down, the whole house of cards comes down with it. This is where IPFS/Swarm’s DHT stuff comes in handy.

Indexing Metadata

This component is the most vital to our mission. All that info about the rip, release, format, bitrate, compression types, etc. That’s all super, super vital to what made What.CD special. There’s a ton of value in knowing that information about a particular album, rip, what have you.

Having this data centralized was what brought the heat. The shear size of What.CD is what made it a target. We need to find a way to recreate this index/database in a decentralized way. This is the part I’m having a tough time with.

We could use Smart Contracts, but I’m not so sure that’s the best way to go about it. DHTs are nice, but there’s not much functionality. Then there’s the whole permission system we need to create in order to update metadata and version files.

Karma/Ratio - Economy of Credit

Call it what you want, but there has to be a way to prevent folks from free leeching the entire system. There’s a few tools we can implement early on to sort of create an economy of credit.

What I would like to propose is a token on Ethereum to not only fund the development of such a project, but also a way to provide credit for seeding, ripping, uploading, etc. There’s no better distributed way to pay for things than a decentralized currency. AMIRITE?

Moving Forward

I’m interested in looking for a group of folks that understand these underlying technologies and would like to collaborate on a proof of concept with accompanying white paper that outlines how this would work.