OpenSwarm pays a seeder per verified piece served, and nothing pays anyone
to stay. An archive, a backup, a dataset waiting for its buyer or a
podcast's back catalogue earns nothing the month nobody downloads it, so
it dies the way every swarm always has. And nothing in BitTorrent says who
put a swarm there or whether they were allowed to, which is why a seeder
is presumed to be doing something wrong.
pay2seed is the member document for both halves. An attestation, signed
at upload with a fixed basis (own, licensed, open-license, public-domain,
personal) and a notice endpoint, is what a hub requires before it will
list anything; public claims get a claim window and a standing, and a
notice voids them. An offer escrows a budget at an ippay hub for a swarm,
public or private, to be held by M seeders for N days at a price per
GiB-month, bought over x402 exactly as a pass is. Seeders take leases,
prove each period by storage challenge or by a probe over the ordinary
wire, and are paid through the payee they already have. Public feeds ride
on ipdb; ipfile.pin on c0mpute is the same offer on the auction.
Also: the family table, stack diagram and registry rows; the ip seed
command group; PRD 0006; the protocol row on /openswarm.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5.1 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01SKAohrRkqLKVQL2cGCAkR5
BitTorrent distributes bytes better than any CDN and has never been a
product: nobody is paid to seed, and nothing in it is private. Every
Profullstack media property answers that with a central HTTP proxy and a
pass system bolted on, and pays for every byte it serves.
OpenSwarm is an add-on to BitTorrent, carried as BEP 10 extension
messages, that fixes both. The swarm carries AES-256-CTR ciphertext whose
integrity is pinned by two SHA-256 merkle roots in a signed manifest, so
a tracker or DHT node learns an infohash and a size. A leecher buys a
pass over x402 in USDC (the same exchange x402-gateway runs for crawl
passes, settled by CoinPay), a seeder serves inside a bounded credit
window, and the leecher signs a cumulative voucher for every verified
batch. Whoever seeds gets paid. Vanilla clients remain valid members and
browsers remain first-class peers.
Adding a file mints a key pair for it, derived from one publisher seed by
default so there is one thing to back up: the public half is the file's
identity and its BEP 46 key, the private half signs the manifest and
authorises grants and payout changes, and a separate content key
encrypts the bytes and is sealed to paying peers.
The family: a core (records, keys, hashing, transports, discovery,
events), ipfile, ippay, ipdb (a signed hash-chained catalogue with heads
on the DHT), ipaudio, ipvideo, iplive (paid relays with backpressure)
and ipname (Moshpit pins and DNS TXT). Plus the c0mpute.com integration
with seven workload types and thirteen use cases, a proposed ip CLI,
conformance profiles, a security model and an FAQ.
Registered on the site the way OpenCreds is: nav entry, docs registry,
sitemap, a /openswarm landing page, PRD 0005, and the MCP prd_next_id
expectation moved to 0006.
Specs only. No code, no schemas, no reference implementation.
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01YafYxayh7Gqe5MWNNQMev2
Co-authored-by: Claude Fable 5.1 <noreply@anthropic.com>