Discussion about paper "Towards a peer-to-peer imageboard"

I'm reading the paper posted by Fredrick Brennan regarding the different approaches of making a decentralized image board and i came to this part.

"In a BitTorrent-like magnet
network, unpopular or old images can fall out of the network over time, but in a
blockchain, all images must be stored forever no matter what they depict."

I think there is a clear winner here being the bit torrent approach, follow the approach most chans have traditionally used that old/inactive images/threads fall out of the ecosystem of the board.

Other urls found in this thread:

8ch.net/tech/archive/
hownew.ru
github.com/HelloZeroNet/ZeroNet/issues/1914
people.eecs.berkeley.edu/~istoica/papers/2003/cacm03.pdf
github.com/smugdev/smugboard
twitter.com/NSFWRedditGif

Imageboards are not meant to be a permanently archived and searchable format, if you think they should then you should also think about going back to reddit.

OP is a fag

you are an idiot

OP is a faggot and should go back. There's already a decentralized imageboard on zeronet that handles this problem by making anons host the posts they want to see, and unhost/hide the posters they dont. Along with having to download each post individually as they view the thread to reduce bandwidth. Those posters that got hid could just make a new ID and post under it if they cared to. There's even a universal anonymous ID that if posted under makes it hard to hide posts.

Well this isn't a botpost glownigger thread is it?

SAGE.

We already have a thread for his

I visited image boards on the deep Web And I visited peer to peer image boards and let me tell you they are a bad idea Because it just ends up turning into a cp fest

Just block images you faggot and only click/download images selectively you want to see. Which is to say do not download cp. If some faggot is spamming cp just delete/remove his posts that don't have any text content and block his posting ID. Also I don't see cp on any of the p2p boards I browse.....

Decentralized anything isn't really a good idea in the first place. I mean look at how peertube, mastodon, etc all suck.

This. Centralization is the way to go sadly. Got no other choice.

enjoy your botnet.

Those are all federation (the worst parts of both centralization and decentralization), not decentralization. Decentralized data distribution, with an authoritative, centralized list of content is the future. The torrent site model is the correct one

There's two big factors being overlooked

You need a healthy community for any decentralized network to function

and

Self-censorship is not a solution; part of what makes imageboards great is that you're forced to wade through all the crap to find the gems.

How can you maintain a community if not everyone is seeing the same thing? How can you dissuade normalfags from wrecking your forum if you can't spam stuff that scares them aware? If the culture is to be preserved, the only way to do that is by ensuring visitors have to see everything.
Desensitize or leave

This leaves a couple of options. The first is "community policing", but since the goal is to have no accounts and no way to even link two posts together, there's no real way to prevent tampering. Voting systems have been shown to not work well to invasions. A technical solution, where threads or even boards have their ratios curved by percentage (so if every post has massive spam flags then the number of reports to be considered spam rises with the average) might alleviate some issues, but it's not perfect.
It would be feasible to allow spending a cryptocurrency to perform mod actions. Perhaps putting votes behind a curreny, so that you feel compelled to use them sparingly (since you still need multiple users voting to actually remove anything). But then you have the issue of how these points are generated and distributed. It's not impossible for a group of invaders to just sit on stacks of this "modcoin" and then coordinate elsewhere to target specific threads or opinions they don't like.
The big issue with any democratic system on an anonymous platform is that you can't verify anyone nor their intentions and you open yourself up both to actions in bad faith and the tyranny of the majority.

It's worth remembering that sites like reddit, for all their other faults, have used voting systems as a method to skew debate and cultivate opinions. It's been proven that a handful of votes at the right time can skew an entire post's performance as well as which comments get seen on that site, and once the "correct" opinions start to be everywhere it will eventually create a cycle where the moderators and everyone there demand stuff that offends them be removed.

In short, in a system like this you need to protect the right of free speech, even for those who use it to demand it be restricted, without compromising on it an inch.
I'd be interested to see what boards on any site would look like with zero moderation. Spam is a real concern, but CP seems to be posted mostly by people who want to prove the site is full of it by planting the evidence. And I don't want terrorists recruiting anywhere. But no controls seem preferable to me than letting people voluntarily avoid opinions they don't want to see. Especially if the tools allow you to pre-emptively ignore or filter comments based on keywords, etc.

Speaking of culture, how can you have event days or wordfilters? They're not necessary and are open to abuse, but they're also fun and part of the culture. A solution would ideally allow for users to collaborate to make these happen.
I don't want to rule out voting systems yet, but it's important they be structured to mediate the worst tendencies of crowds.

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cross linking my reply to the other thread

what do you think about my flag host idea above for illegal content? then have effectively "moderators" that go through all the flags and purposefully host bad flagged threads/replies. since it's decentralized, it would work through redundancy.

what is this, SA?

using my method in the reply above, you could have wordfilters tied to the thread itself rather than the board. so when you post a thread, you can give it word filters while creating it. if enough people use word filters, you can have a word filter board-wide effectively through the normal spread of board culture.

>jew(s) attempt to look covert while shilling for (((centralization)))
Read , also considering further alternatives, and then go away.

My suggestion is nothing like SA. Moderators there are allowed to be Nazis and ban people. They come crawling back and pay for entry.
However, it would put it in line with something like Slashdot, which is really not much better. Under ideal circumstances, my intentions would be to allow users to make sparing moderation votes. But I think it needs to be designed for a worst-case, and by all evidence from sites that allow for this sort of community vote moderation it just is too temperamental and doesn't scale with the size of the site and its community. But I think as an experiment it might be worth consideration, and if the variables are all right it might be functional.

But onto the meat of the issue:

Funny, because after my previous post I was mulling over the idea of opt-out re-seeding. I reached the conclusion that any optional re-seeding would need to be opt-in, to prevent lurkers from allowing spam.
It's definitely workable but I think it has some issues.

Who has moderation power and when do they get elevated privileges?
Even if you assume that a post must be reported first before it can be reviewed (and requires multiple people who did not report it to vote on a final action) it would be potentially possible (depending on system design) to let people game this system.
In regards to moderation action, assume that a group of butthurt SJWs are hanging out in a Discord channel, coordinating to remove posts that hurt their feelings. Does a given moderation system prevent them from either deleting posts they dislike or shuffling them off the board by allowing spam and giving posts they do like a free pass?
My modcoin suggestion was deliberately suggested to make moderating costly, so a few hotpocketeers can't encamp the "review reports" job and form their own tribunal while everyone else is clueless that it's been monopolize and the board is being manipulated.

Keeping the board synchronized is important, and people looking at threads should be looking at the same thing. How do we do this without having swiss cheese threads or inline spam?

Everything still needs a unique post ID and a thread + board to attach. I'm not sure how workable making them independent and attached by context is, but it's a start. It might be functional. But it still needs to tie into those two previous systems. But re-seed disparities might make it difficult or slow.

In light of these considerations, I have a new proposal. While Federations have issues Hotwheels mentioned, I think there may be a middleground between having nodes and having peers that might mediate the downsides of both without killing their benefits entirely.

We could have nodes that act similar to trackers in a swarm. You can connect, sync with the board, and download threads.
Content itself would be P2P, alleviating bandwidth costs for the node.
Nodes can host alternative CSS and MOTD.
The admin of the node can have moderation power within their own node.

Nodes can choose to delete a post, effectively marking it as not for re-seeding.
Visitors to the node and any nodes syncing with that node would then stop receiving copies of the post.
Other nodes do not have to delete the same thread once it has been synced to their node and their peers are sharing it.
All moderation actions would be publishable to a blockchain-based moderation log.
Media gets hashed so it's not hosted.
Makes the record of moderation public.
Not optional since to delete the content you need to write to the log, which must be public so clients and other nodes can know what you're choosing to not re-share.

There's nothing stopping anyone from making a hotpocket mirror on their own node, but if other nodes choose not to re-seed posts from those boards then they'll be off in their own corner, unable to send posts towards the central node cluster.
Minimizes risk of monopolies forming and the need for an exodus.
As long as the most popular boards aren't the most moderation-heavy and they don't collaborate to form a monopoly.

I recognize this might be an issue, especially given the way normalfags beg for censorship, so there are concerns. It's important to be able to have common nodes blacklist spam or cucked nodes so they do not spread without ensuring the most heavily moderated nodes have the power to blacklist totally unmoderated ones.

Nodes could be run as Tor hidden services as well.
If the community works together it could relegate Tor users to second-class citizens but in theory should give them greater freedom to have their own network and full posting privileges, even in the worst-case scenario. Still better than the current situation.

I'd really like to hear your thoughts.

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halfchan to my knowledge doesn't allow users to view archived posts. 4plebs and the like sites took over that arena. IBs will always be forever searchable. Anybody can run a scraper

I am interested in this because right now this website is effectively banned in Australia.

Isn't this then just voting?
Doesn't this just give moderation power to state actors or other well organised SJW groups?
I could be reading a thread and be reading messages that respond to a message I have yet to sync? In isolated nodes, or node clusters that are just starting to coalesce into their own little echo chamber, this would be a bit fragile (but maybe sync issues for these small clusters is preferable).

CP can be easily hidden in normal images

$noun+s
$poster 'is a fag'
spotted the crossposternigger

(((zeronet shill detected)))
Maybe you're the one who needs to go...

(((cianigger detected)))
Said like a true retard.
Newfag, go back to reddit. We already had native archival system for like 3 years ago 8ch.net/tech/archive/
HOWNEW(dot)RU?

Nigger is black-mad.

hownew.ru
>uses BT over (((internet)))
>(((ted talk autist)))
lel
Design defects, a lot of them.

As if tor/i2p isn't already that anyways and this shit isn't even finished yet and you're spreading FUD shit? go back to reddit, I can literally smell your reddit tabs leaking and I'm covering my nose rn kys fucking LEA slider
If any, I'd be more worried about forum sliders like (You).

or a well-compartmentalized design where the BB owners/partners can easily moderate it like it's fucking in your drive and torrent dashboard not some remote database,
You can even import gpg keys to only receive trusted boards.
Decentralized network by hardware is an easy feat, if you're going zeronetmeme you're falling for software-level 'blockchainmeme' decentralization which has to go through centralized TCP/UDP and still relies heavily into the ISP that the big Alphabet can afford anyday and force you to send your government ID before you can use it!

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I feel like you might have something of value to contribute to the conversation, but first you're gonna have to stop acting like a retarded gorilla nigger.

github.com/HelloZeroNet/ZeroNet/issues/1914

the internet is already decentralized by design

anyone can run their own imageboard server. it can even be a hidden service to have privacy and censorship resistance. what more do you need? what actual benefits does P2P offer that onion can’t?

archival? just run an archival service on top of ipfs, or automatically broadcast torrents of the database.

censorship? good luck deanonymizing the hidden service.

the alternative would just be a CP ridden wastland that would take 30 minutes to load. it turns out that when people own things, they take care of their things.

The server which hosts the board is not decentralised. It is open to a single targeted attack. Accessing that server is also not decentralised, the disruption of the host countries connection to the internet would affect the world.

...

Even assuming a perfect server that has software that is 100% secure, it still doesn't protect the board from a sudden lack of connection.

Any of the peers involved in a peer to peer network are open to being targeted. P2P software can contain as many flaws as server software. The only advantage of P2P is not having a single point of failure. Even then you get around this by having a half decent admin.

I think you are missing the point despite highlighting it. Yes, not having a single point of failure is the big ticket item. It means that governmemts can't stop it, it means large internet companies like google can't delist it. It means that everyone is genuinely anonymous.

My two cents on this issue. since the last week has prompted a lot of thinking. The primary failure I'm coming to realize with 4chan, and especially Zig Forums is a simple one: Trying to host lots of communities on the same site, and especially ones that are controversial. Historically /b/ and its culture as an "Internet Hate Machine", and most recently Zig Forums's excessive right-wing politics to the point someone enacted a massacre with their approval, and to the detriment of the quieter communities that just want to talk video games and such.

A similar point can be made about all the online games that don't allow private servers. When the game is being played by a wide variety of people either you have no communication, alternative communication (not possible with random matches) or what is allowed is set to the lowest "no fun allowed" denominator. Zig Forums partly sidesteps this issue by having extremely liberal permissions on what's permitted, and letting the individual ones decide how they are to be run, but again, the bad apples ruin the bunch.

computers were a mistake

Zig Forums shouldn't be an issue. boards and servers can be seen as just being a carrier which doesn't have responsibilities for what is being said on their platform. Mods and BO would be responsible to make sure no one posts anything that directly incites violence. Though platforms like google and facebook have personally advocated for receiving more responsibility as a carrier because they are the only ones capable of censoring content while incidents like the FB NZ-livestream can be ignored as blocking facebook isn't an option due to their marketposition.

Although the move towards more censorship is happening. The original rules of carriers and responsibility should be applied. If 8ch goes down due to the video's about the shooter then so should FB if the judges aren't morally corrupt to the core yet.

People who get turned off by the h8chan stuff don't belong here, Zig Forums is doing its job just fine keeping you people out

In principle I agree. But, expectations vs. reality, and also Zig Forums's moderators were not only too slow to delete the original thread but the real problem is the community as a whole were totally down with it, and they are, sadly, one of the more active boards. Thread ID is 12916717 if you want to confirm this with archive.fo and the like. This is the first and last comment's date stamp before it 404'd. ~1½ hours, not even including all the follow-up threads and discussion on other boards.

03/15/19 (Fri) 00:28:41 ID: c800e3 No.12916717
03/15/19 (Fri) 02:08:39 ID: 449848 No.12917698

Go fuck yourself. If I was "turned off" as you put it I'd hardly still be posting in the parts of the site I care about. I actually did used to post on Zig Forums solely because I had a strong dislike of mainstream media following the handling of GamerGate, and was more receptive to alternative viewpoints, and Zig Forums used to have some insightful and useful information. Eventually that stopped being true, and tedious political shitflinging got old.

People like you make up 99% of the internet. Of course some are going to post here when it's an anonymous board with 0 barrier to entry, but the culture does a good job of keeping undesirables away. You obviously don't belong here if you're complaining about Tarrant, who brought us months worth of comedy gold. If that offends your sensibilities you are free to make your own milquetoast site where you ban anyone who posts anything you don't like. Also if you ever cared about gamergate you should kill yourself.

And Zig Forums was always a trashfire

People like you do not make Zig Forums except on Zig Forums.

Go sob on facebook about how evil Brenton Tarrant was you goofy loser. There's a million places on the internet where you can cry about that, but you come here and complain about the one place where you can post what you like. Piss off

The most retarded post in this thread.

This is accurate. The imageboard on Zeronet does a lot of things right, has few bugs, and many features.
If it wasn't for some of the current limitations of Zeronet it would the perfect imageboard.

DHT could help avoiding issues like that but the main dev refuses to make it a priority unless enough people donate to support that feature.

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How clueless can you be?

That's my line. I don't care about your idealism. I care about reality.

There is no idealism at play, Zig Forums advertises itself as "Darkest Reaches of the Internet", and claims on the home page "In the interest of free speech, only content that violates the Digital Millennium Copyright Act or other United States laws is deleted." You seem to disagree with that, and one hero going postal in a mosque has outed you as someone who doesn't belong here, hence my suggestion for you to return to facebook

Unfortunately there is. Do you really think that the majority of people actually believe Zig Forums is separate to Zig Forums? I genuinely wish this were the case. Because then I would not have to care about what Zig Forums was doing! Again, I don't give a flying fuck about ideals. I care about what will happen in the reality I'm in. Zig Forums has already started to be blocked where I am, only on a pathetic DNS level, but still. It actually matters.

ou are just proving him right, the sites self-branding is an ideal, reality is that it does delete lawful content and even boards and a fascist terrorist killing civilians advertising this site is not going to help us continue to use it undisturbed.

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Imagine being such a milqtoste faggot that you didn't have to use onions to talk about what you want.

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Yes, Zig Forums is blocked where I'm living now too. I need to use tor to access it. But this is fundamentally an idealistic problem, censorship is a core tenant of almost all liberal ideologies. Freedom of speech is under unprecedented assault in every western nation, if we proceed along the same path we're on, sooner or later all the internet will be as censored as facebook. I don't think the way to fix it is to cave, and start banning offensive content in the hopes they'll leave you alone - the censorship will just continue to less offensive stuff until the internet is differentiated from cable tv. The importance of preserving something like Zig Forums where you can say whatever the fuck you want is critical, I hardly think there's a more important issue now than that. But speaking practically, I don't see a point to Zig Forums if it's sanitized, I think the main reason I come back here is I like that it reminds me of the old internet when things were more free

I don't care, I would rather see Zig Forums shut down by the authorities than cuck to the censors

They did that years ago by shutting down the best board.

Don't get me wrong, I don't agree with being censored from a site I like, and am doing everything in my power to post to the parts I love regardless of what our scummy media and politicians say about Zig Forums. I'd daresay we've got more in common than you'd expect.

I'm not asking jim to host anything illegal, if the 1A goes, obviously Zig Forums will die too. I'm just saying Zig Forums should exist as an example of the first amendment, as long as Zig Forums exists you know freedom of speech still exists

Yes I think most of us at least on Zig Forums are on the same page for the important issues. I just really don't think you'll get anything by trying to appease the media or politicians. What Tarrant did is quite clearly going to give them some free ammo, but they've been working for a long time now to snuff out the internet, and I don't think they're going to stop even if we all agreed to stop fedposting

I have total agreement on that. To expand, the mainstream media are commiting a grave mistake in their ignorance. Again, I left 4chan because of distrust in the media, and this recent event has not made me think otherwise, and likewise for the recent coverage of Zig Forums's "responsibility".

In closing I may have some disagreement on means, but on ideals, I do not.

you mean like what happens literally all the time for P2P stuff? >99% of torrents have 0 seeders. >99% of "distributed imageboards" would have 0 seeders too. but if I run my own server, then it's accessible to the world even if I'm the only active user.

a distributed imageboard wouldn't be like Bitcoin where people have a financial incentive to keep the network running. an imageboard is pure content/entertainment, just like torrents, so would only be as accessible as its popularity. and then what would separate such a place from Red*it?

a server that someone owns can provide equal treatment to unpopular content AND incentivize cleaning up spam/CP (no one wants that shit on their machines).

I've come to realize censorship is actually a good thing. Its just a question of what you are censoring. Competition over decentralization.

And anybody who disagrees is likely a pedo faggot.

Image boards are already only as accessible as the number of people on it. If no one's posting, the board dies. I'm not sure I understand the difference.
Separate from Reddit is simple. It's not super-easy to access which will already scare off most people, which TBH i think is a problem to get the decentralised p2p board started. In addition, the imageboard culture will keep people away, as it usually does.

Something else that comes to mind. The "hosting and distributing" of child pornography is illegal most everywhere. I can see a government, such as Australia, claiming that having the imagery on your computer is hosting (even if you're unaware of it), and the "seeding" of that content to other peers as distribution.
To work around this, i believe a method could be devised where no uploaded content is stored, in it's entirety, on a single peer. It could scale with the size of the network, but essentially, a peer will only hold a fraction of the medias data, the media broken in such a way that it doesn't allow even partial viewing. When the bits are put back together, I believe you're legally protected as it's unintentional viewing.
This could be expanded into storing the text of posts as well due to some ideas being considered illegal in some places (you can't wrote CP fiction in Australia, so the text of such on your peer could be illegal)

That's tricky, because I'm sure there are a lot of cases where you would only have 1 seeder.

Consider a gif thread in which OP dumps a bunch of gifs. Then someone else comes along and bumps wanting to keep the thread alive. If the original OP leaves the swarm there's no way for the second poster to keep the thread alive.

That's just one example, but I'm sure there are many such cases in which there's only one person who wants to keep a thread and its contents alive

I use a number of obscure image/text boards that only have a handful of users. They would not survive as P2P bittorent-like software, as it's unlikely a user will always have their computer connected to "seed" when I want to use the website.

What are the goals?

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That's a decent idea. You can somehow incentivize (or maybe make mandatory) users having a rpi zero, or some other cheap $5 ARM board, being powered on nearly 24/7 just serving a few dozen megabytes of content. And you can have all seeders subscribe to a list that would provide a list of illegal content so it can be deleted as soon as possible. The total monetary cost for such a setup is low, and it solves most of the problems you bring up. The only exception is anonymity, of course you don't want the kikes kicking in your door if you say gas the jews, or if you're hosting a node with gas the jews on it. Routing every host node through tor would be compoundingly slow because most would already be on home connections. I don't think there's a good way to solve that problem.

That would still be illegal. If you have a link on your computer to a CP website, you still go to jail.

This is true but I don't know if you can prosecuted for downloading a steganographic image (for those retards this is different than concatenating a file).

the courts will just treat this with the "spirit of the law" rather than the "letter of the law". if you have a bunch of such files on your drive, then you will be seen as trying to circumvent the law while still committing the crime.

the only solution is to stay out of the government's radar. once they have you, there are no tricks you can pull.

You can run a proxy on p2p, user. Take a look at Fopnu and Tixati as examples.

You guys aren't answering the question of the hosts censorship, let alone cost to host.
This shitty site is only operational because some rich cunt is putting money into it. That won't last, and it's unlikely to ever even occur again.
Split the hosting costs across a p2p network and we're golden.

I'm not suggesting the cp remain in the network. At least, if individuals say "fuck no" the bits and bytes that they may be holding onto would be discarded. I imagine you would need a system such as suggested in Brennan's paper, people can opt-in to censorship lists. The janitors do a good job, and they can do that good job on these lists that others can choose to subscribe to.

As of now, there's also an owner that constantly needs to have a server running. It works fine, even while imageboards lose a lot of money. P2P should at least take some of the cost away.
Optional subscriptions to censorship lists by hash would probably be necessary though, sadly enough.

Hotwheels is a speed demon. And by that I mean he's on meth.

You reek of soy. You need to stop fapping to tranny porn and start doing push-ups and pull-ups.

How would you discover peers in a p2p chan, if it's meant to be both anonymous and completely distributed? You can't have any sort of centralised server like TOR; you can't have a static list of initial peers like GNU. You can't port-scan, it would take an eternity, is probably less-than-legal, and your ISP would probably shut you down.

You need some sort of bootstrap node to get into the network, then once you've joined you do peer discovery with an algorithm like chord or kademlia (which is what bittorrent's DHT uses)

Yeah, but then censorship of the bootstrap peers stops people from connecting to the board. Plus, with all those peers listed in the DHT there's absolutely zero anonymity... unless I'm not understanding these things correctly.

A way you could solve this is to have each peer addressable by it's own .onion URL rather than IP, and have the DHT store those onion URLs
True, but it doesn't stop the board from functioning if a bootstrap node is taken down, just new users from connecting. It wouldn't affect the majority of board users, and it would be very easy for any peer to set themselves up as a bootstrap node if they wanted to. That opens up the challenge of how to advertise these new bootstrap nodes (maybe just have by default a lot of bootstrap nodes rendering total censorship improbable), but I think it's a relatively minor concern as the board would still be working while under attack

I must still be missing something in my understanding. If the DHT is a collection of onion URLs, or something similar, how does the network actually ``start``? The hidden services would need to pick some peers as introduction points, but those can only be discoverable via the .onion URLs in the DHT?
How it selects those introductory points could also be cause for concern. If the introductory points are simply other peers, then someone with a sufficiently large enough group of peers could control access to other peers, potentially disabling the network.

DHTs are a fairly thoroughly researched topic, if you want to learn more I'd suggest finding a paper on them with a title that interests you. There was a good one I read a couple months ago from the early 2000s that compared Chord to a bunch of different DHTs, and gave a good overview of each and how they worked, but I can't seem to find it now. For any implementation it's trivial to rewrite it to replace peer identification via IP with .onion domain names
That's a good point, bootstrapping nodes for bittorrent's DHT are usually owned by large companies that are trusted in the torrent world like bittorrent inc. probably for that exact reason. But even if you could only have one central bootstrap node it's really not a big deal, any clients who had connected to the board before would have a cached list of peers to bootstrap off. So any downtime on the bootstrap node would only affect people who had never visited the site before

I just skimmed it, but I think this was the paper that explained it in retard-friendly terms. people.eecs.berkeley.edu/~istoica/papers/2003/cacm03.pdf
Bear in mind that it's from 2003, and the actual implementation of modern DHTs will be different, but it gives a good overview as kademlia, chimera etc are all either direct or indirect evolutions of the systems in that paper

Quick question, is the PDF hosted somewhere? Specifically I'm interested if it's on Git since it has that LaTeX look and might be done in a way old drafts and such can be looked at.

Maybe you don't, kike shill.

I don't think I'm being very clear. How can a DHT possibly work with onion URLs? Where would the introductory points come from, just random peers?

Sir this has already been done and tried Several times And just like socialsm It's been tried many times but the results are the same and they're not good

I'm not sure what you mean. A DHT is just a list of which endpoints store which pieces of content. So for a tor based DHT you would address a peer as abc123.onion instead of 10.0.2.5. The introductory point would just be a regular bootstrap node, but again addressed as xzy321.onion instead of router.utorrent.com

Do you mean HW's draft? Get it directly from his twatter feed or right here in the feckin OP m8.

I understand what a DHT is. I'm talkong about the onion URLs. If you rely on the bootstrap peers as the introductory points, than blocking them would prevent new people from joining, AND would probably prevent existing people reconnecting (I'm assuming ever time you connect you have a new onion url). To be clear, I mean the introductory points for the onion urls.

You can't block an individual onion. You could (and many countries do, to varying degrees of success) block the entire tor network. But as long as tor is up, you can treat every onion link as accessible as well.

Well you don't necessarily need to do that. You can think of it as a regular domain name, once you've generated the private key that owns abc123.onion you theoretically control it forever. As for the privacy implications of having a single identifiable url up over a long period of time, I don't think they're serious. There's nothing to tie a poster to a host node, as it is the servers that are addressed by .onion domain names - not the clients. So if the real IP of abc123.onion were to be somehow revealed it would not provide any leak of posting history, just the fact that 10.2.5.3 is participating in the network.

Bootstrapping should be considered a rare occurrence, only used when a client either accidentally wipes his drive or somehow otherwise removes the cached list of peers, or when a client joins the network for the first time. In either case, an attack on a bootstrap node would only affect a small minority of potential participants in the network and isn't that big of an issue in my opinion.

This is confusing, I mean when the client is acting as a client (sends a new post to a list of peers), vs acting as a server (serves a post to the network). Obviously a peer is both a client and server

Thanks for being patient with me. But I'm still missing something.
If PeerA attempts to connect to a peer, they have that peers .onion from the DHT that they accessed via a bootstrap peer. The DHT must contain the public key and introduction point for that .onion URL. Now PeerA has to connect to the introduction point to get everything set up to access the hidden service. What/where/who are these introduction points? Are we talking about utilizing TOR to make every peer in the network their own hidden service? If that's the case, I'd say it's a bad idea as TOR is already not that secure and putting a p2p system on top of it would only make the systen complicated and therefore more prone to security concerns.

I myself am very interested in these topics as I would like to work on a project like this. A distributed, anonymous, P2P chan.

Yes
Writing your own anonymization network would be much harder, less anonymous, more likely to have vulnerabilities and more complicated than just using tor. Tor hidden services pretty much operate as a reverse proxy ontop of whatever service you have underneath, it's about as simple of a system as you can get.

I think we just disagree then. I don't think attachment to any other service is a good thing.

Considering you never used tor and didn't read the FAQ on torproject.org I suggest you leave alone, lol

So just firejail it.