I live a minimalist life. I don't like the idea of having an extra hard drive running 24/7 in my home, even if I would be paid for that.
I donated a portion of my 1 tb hard disk to the node, so it's not an extra hard drive, just software that's running on my existing hardware. You can configure it to consume as much or as little of the drive as you'd prefer.
I'd be very worried about someone hosting someone illegal on my node.
I wouldn't doubt that there's illegal things possibly even on my own hard disk on the node, but there's no way for me to check as it's encrypted with a hash that I have no access to. Same as my Freenet Project donation. So even if something illegal was on the disk on my node, I legally have an out as I have no way of telling what's on it and no way to manage it beyond killing the node.
Let's say worst case scenario I believe you and I can agree on being the worst possible thing. Child porn. Let's assume someone uploaded an hour long video of them fiddling kids. How that file would be distributed is a redundant copy, a little bit of it on my node, and a little bit of it on many other nodes. So let's say my node only ends up getting 2 minutes of that disgusting video on it while it's split up among so many other nodes to offset the load and make redundancy possible. That 2 minutes of video doesn't have all the data for the video so the video result is corrupt as a standalone. It would require access to the whole of the file to really know what's contained on it.
And in order to be able to obtain the whole file, you'd actually have to be looking for it specifically or know someone who shared the hash with you.
Less serious illegal content would be piracy, you could be hosting portions of a pirated movie or cracked video game and the like. NO way to tell. However you're also likely hosting a bunch of content from various websites that are simply just offloading their content that are benign in nature.
Your explanation makes 100% sense to me, because I'm a computer programmer. The problem is if authorities want to crack down on a system like this, the first thing they would want to do is to make a sample case of an average person receiving a life-term.
Sure, an IT expert can follow how this system works, but explaining it to 12 average people in a court case would be hard. All they would understand is someone having x minutes of illegal content on their hard drive, broadcasting it to the whole word.
Yes, I know the chances are slim, but I'd rather pass this one.
There's already been lawsuits against Freenet and IPFS itself, the nodes being downloaded from aren't exactly easy to track either. So far the authorities have went directly after the main source, which is Freenet Project and IPFS.io rather than the actual nodes. The authorities have been unsuccessful because both Freenet and IPFS have legitimate legal uses, far more than anything illegal, and the argument is that any legal tool can be used for illegalities. Car salesmen don't sell a car with the expectation that a ton of pedestrians will be slaughtered with it.
Trust me, they've tried, and they've failed. Authorities have tried going after a Freenet node before, the case was quickly dismissed due to the nature of the storage being put forth in good faith of being used for legit purposes and encryption preventing knowledge of what's there.