I sort of feel like there should be some way to use some kind of construct to get people to seed things so that others seed things for them, but I haven't seen that invented yet.
Been a while since I've looked at them, but IPFS with FileCoin and Ethereum Swarm had that kind of goal.
It might be beneficial to create something like what you describe without any cryptocurrency association though, and I've been mulling over possibilities for distributed systems that are inherently currency-less to avoid all of the scams that cryptocurrency attracts.
The leader in that space is Skynet, which basically is like IPFS + Filecoin but also has dynamic elements to it, and a lot better performance + reliability.
Cryptocurrency is helpful because it allows you to incentivize people to hold the data. If you don't have cryptocurrency, you're basically dependent on altruism to keep data alive (like bittorrent, or ipfs without filecoin). Popular files do okay for a while, but even popular files struggle to provide good uptime and reliability after a few years.
On an incentivized network like Sia or Filecoin, you can have high performance and reliability without ever needing any users to keep their machines online and seeding.
