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It's 2017 and I'm so surprised that BT is still the dominant way to share copyrighted works illegally. Why hasn't a fully decentralized and E2E encrypted altern

It's 2017 and I'm so surprised that BT is still the dominant way to share copyrighted works illegally. Why hasn't a fully decentralized and E2E encrypted alternative replaced it? Who wants to actually run trackers these days? F2F software like http://retroshare.net/ http://retroshare.net/ exists, but nobody is using it.

amelius 9y ago
How would that work? I believe you can still get caught with such systems, because if somebody can download from your machine, that somebody could just as well be a government agent. Unless it uses something like Tor, but in that case it could become illegal to run exit nodes. The person running the exit node could legally be considered an accomplice.
- mynewtb 9y ago
  Retroshare has anonymous tunnels.
Cyph0n 9y ago
I learned about IPFS the other day and it seems like an interesting alternative. Although I don't believe that bandwidth can be shared among nodes (seeding).
rakoo 9y ago
Because it has the lowest friction ? There are dozens of software speaking bittorrent already (instead of only retroshare speaking retroshare), there is a lot of resource on the web explaining how to start download, there is no need to gather friends as a F2F desires.
sp332 9y ago
Bittorrent doesn't need trackers anymore. Use DHT to find a node with part of the file you want, and peer exchange to query that node for the other nodes that have the rest of the file.
zanny 9y ago
People flock to huge public trackers and reputable private ones for the accuracy of finding what you are looking for. On fully distributed systems, anyone can call anything whatever they want, and you need an authorship or rating system for users to give support to reputable sources. I don't believe any decentralized network, including ipfs, has come up with a way for consensus accreditation of a source as being legitimate. If you look for a movie on piratebay, you have the ratings users give the torrents, the comments they write on it, and the number of active swarmers on that torrent all as credence to the legitimacy of it. If you lose any of that information you lose accuracy in finding what you actually want.
pwinnski 9y ago
If I work for Fox (or whomever), I share a file called Logan.2017.1080p.WEB-DL.H264.AC3.mkv but it's actually random bytes. In fact, I have a bunch of virtual hosts all around the globe sharing the same random bytes under that filename. How do you tell the difference between what I'm sharing and the file you probably want that isn't garbage? The easiest way to date as been to have a website that indexes torrent files. As that grows increasingly unfeasible, how does a fully decentralized system fulfill the same function?

amelius 9y ago

How would that work? I believe you can still get caught with such systems, because if somebody can download from your machine, that somebody could just as well be a government agent. Unless it uses something like Tor, but in that case it could become illegal to run exit nodes. The person running the exit node could legally be considered an accomplice.

mynewtb 9y ago
Retroshare has anonymous tunnels.

Cyph0n 9y ago

I learned about IPFS the other day and it seems like an interesting alternative. Although I don't believe that bandwidth can be shared among nodes (seeding).

rakoo 9y ago

Because it has the lowest friction ? There are dozens of software speaking bittorrent already (instead of only retroshare speaking retroshare), there is a lot of resource on the web explaining how to start download, there is no need to gather friends as a F2F desires.

sp332 9y ago

Bittorrent doesn't need trackers anymore. Use DHT to find a node with part of the file you want, and peer exchange to query that node for the other nodes that have the rest of the file.

zanny 9y ago

People flock to huge public trackers and reputable private ones for the accuracy of finding what you are looking for. On fully distributed systems, anyone can call anything whatever they want, and you need an authorship or rating system for users to give support to reputable sources. I don't believe any decentralized network, including ipfs, has come up with a way for consensus accreditation of a source as being legitimate. If you look for a movie on piratebay, you have the ratings users give the torrents, the comments they write on it, and the number of active swarmers on that torrent all as credence to the legitimacy of it. If you lose any of that information you lose accuracy in finding what you actually want.

pwinnski 9y ago

If I work for Fox (or whomever), I share a file called Logan.2017.1080p.WEB-DL.H264.AC3.mkv but it's actually random bytes. In fact, I have a bunch of virtual hosts all around the globe sharing the same random bytes under that filename. How do you tell the difference between what I'm sharing and the file you probably want that isn't garbage? The easiest way to date as been to have a website that indexes torrent files. As that grows increasingly unfeasible, how does a fully decentralized system fulfill the same function?