3 ms·
> For all practical purposes BitTorrent needs trackers for initial peer discovery It does not. I have downloaded many DHT-only torrents. Startup time tends to
by the8472 9y ago
> For all practical purposes BitTorrent needs trackers for initial peer discovery
It does not. I have downloaded many DHT-only torrents. Startup time tends to be a little longer, but that's mostly because implementations are tweaked for low packet per second rates and not low latency, which in turn is somewhat related to the poor quality of many home routers which do not deal well with the UDP traffic.
> so it's not really much of a downgrade.
Since people are trying to decentralize the web recentralizing already decentralized protocols seems a huge step backwards to me.
> Even with a DHT for any kind of practical content discovery, sites would need to track at least one member of the swarm so new peers can join.
In bittorrent the DHT is not about content discovery, it is a global network which you only need to join once (contacts are persisted - something not possible with webrtc) which can then be used for peer discovery for individual swarms.
This makes it fully decentralized.