3 ms·

IPFS doesnt use bittorrent. Its bittorrent like, bitswap, with some "new protocol in town problems".

• vog 10y ago
  I wonder why IPFS hasn't been built on top of Bittorrent, so it could reuse some of the existing infrastructure. For example, everybody hosting a file in IPFS could automatically become a BT seeder for that file. And searching on Pirate Bay for a certail file path / hash could make the file accessible to people who have a BT client but do not (yet) run IPFS on their machine.
  • wmf 10y ago
    This kind of backwards compatibility works against network effects for the new protocol though.
  • antocv 10y ago
    Its my impression that bitswap was chosen/made, to have an easier time making "trading strategies" with other peers. BitTorrent would for that purpose be harder to modify, and claim backwards-compatibility, so I think they went all-in, and bitswap - with pluggable "trading strategies", ie how to decide which peer to share with and how much - how to avoid free-leach and so on. There was a mention of combining ipfs with filecoin - bitswap would make that integration easier.
  • edraferi 10y ago
    One could implement an IPFS-BitTorrent bridge. WebTorrent's hybrid peer [1] does something similar. [1] https://github.com/feross/webtorrent https://github.com/feross/webtorrent