Researchers Create Self-Replicating Seedbox in Quest for Decentralized Democracy * TorrentFreak

Researchers Create Self-Replicating Seedbox in Quest for Decentralized Democracy

Most torrent sites that were active in 2005 are long gone and the same applies to the software project from that era.

The academic torrent client Tribler is a notable exception and if it’s up to the people running it, it will go on indefinitely.

Tribler is part of a research project at Delft University of Technology, headed by associate professor Johan Pouwelse. Over the years, Tribler found itself to be a safe haven for pirate site channels, a decentralized music streaming platform, and an AI-powered search engine, among other things.

The core idea always revolved around decentralization. The software and the network should be impossible to shut down. While academic achievements are not always picked up broadly, the research project’s output is highly valued and just secured funding through 2032.

Ironically, the development of the decentralized BitTorrent client is highly centralized. It’s run by a university team and paid for by subsidies. However, its own research may offer an eventual solution to that problem, starting with a self-replicating seedbox.

The Self-Replicating Seedbox

One of Tribler’s latest projects is a self-replicating seedbox called Mycelium, named after the underground fungal networks it is meant to resemble. This is part of a larger superorganism experiment into a decentrally governed community.

The Mycelium

In simple terms, the seedbox starts a single server. When community members fund the project with bitcoin a new VPS server launches a fresh seedbox, after which the process will repeat itself. This results in an ever-expanding service as long as sufficient funds come in.

The content being seeded is Creative Commons material, not copyrighted works. The BitTorrent seeding is managed by libtorrent and the Bitcoin mechanics by a standard wallet. Once it’s set up, it can function independently.

The combination of all these elements, including voting and payment, could do more than replicate seedboxes. The same technology and framework can also be used to set up mirror websites, to replicate URLs, or to register new domain names.

A Decentralized Digital Democracy

The seedbox project isn’t completely decentralized, as it relies on GitHub and the VPS provider SporeStack. The researchers acknowledge this and in a recent master thesis, Stan Verlaan described this as the "governance paradox of decentralized systems".

While there is no immediate solution, the thesis does offer a solution for how a community can help decide on the future of a project, while also funding it.

The proposed solution is a TwoStepDemocracy. In the first step, users vote on which problems are worth solving or which feature needs to be implemented. Based on these votes, the developers can then submit solutions.

The community then votes on whether the proposed solutions or changes should be implemented. If a solution passes that community vote and enough users have pledged Bitcoin to fund it, the developer gets paid.

This setup sounds straightforward, but it is significantly different from how software development usually works. A project’s evolution doesn’t rely on a group of gatekeepers who decide, but on the votes of a broader community, which in turn is independent of the funding.

The Utopian Dream

The researchers don’t understate their ambitions. On the superorganism-experiment GitHub page, the project’s future vision, or "Utopian dream", is described with little reservation

"We are creating our own society. A place citizens have FULL control, have their own MONEY, have AI that serves THEM, and CONTROL together. Unstoppable by design, self-replicating, self-hosted, self-evolving, and human oversight with democratic governance," the description reads.

That framing isn’t necessarily limited to software. Tribler’s Dr. Pouwelse tells TorrentFreak that the project has been collaborating with the Dutch tax authority and the authority for the financial markets on trust, identity en governance isues. At the same time, he’s increasingly finding an audience among European Commission officials as well.

Tribler’s voting experiment

The connection makes sense. In recent years, Internet infrastructure and AI development have become further concentrated in the hands of a few large American companies, so Europe has a growing interest in public, decentralized alternatives.

Tribler’s research doesn’t propose any groundbreaking new technologies. Its strength lies in the combination of technologies. Whether this can scale into anything concrete remains highly uncertain.

For now, the TwoStepDemocracy idea remains a technical proof of concept. The thesis itself acknowledges this, and stresses that a larger study is needed to combine all elements, from voting to payment to development, to see how it functions.

The Tribler team isn’t...