Based on the hash - it would be helpful to have ratio information so that after downloading a file, one can delete it (if not needed) with reassurance that it was redistributed sufficiently to give back to the network and keep the file alive.

with torrents, one can see the number of seeds being reported. But also, it has been reported that torrent sharing has an average life of under 40 days.

If something is worth sharing, perhaps the best course is to keep sharing it. I have had one documentary downloaded from me over 1000 times on tixati. And I keep sharing it.

But with tixati, we also have the ability to unshare based on active seed count. I typically set that low to preserve my bandwidth for rare files. I have thousands of torrents active that I find no one else at all is sharing. So I am their last hope.

No amount of ratio can tell if the file will stay alive since most people do not stay connected.

What devs of any P2P network do not seem to actually understand is that the weak point of P2P isn't the protocol or bandwidth or anything like that, it's the incentive to share. Without an incentive to share and stay connected, a P2P network is pretty much close to useless.

Cryptocurrencies have proven it is possible, since they already addressed this problem as they need the nodes to stay active to update and serve the blockchains.

When someone create a P2P network centered on this single priority they will get 100% of the P2P usage. For now we remain stuck with centralized bittorrent and dependent on trackers with ratio, plus a myriad of perpetually deserted networks like Gnutella, Fopnu and Retroshare.