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I have to admit, BitTorrent is one of the things I took for granted. I never really thought about the details of how it works, or the really really impressive

I have to admit, BitTorrent is one of the things I took for granted. I never really thought about the details of how it works, or the really really impressive feats that were accomplished to get it to work. I knew it was a really good technology, but reading this and the comments here puts it on a whole other level. Why isn't this technology talked about more? Why are blockchains the big "thing" right now with people trying to use them everywhere to see where they fit best, but torrent networks are kind of just... ignored? The decentralized nature of it seems to open so many possibilities at first glance, is there a reason they aren't being taken advantage of? Is there some kind of "great filter" kind of thing that is preventing widespread usage of something like a torrent network?

wongarsu 9y ago
BitTorrent is "just" exchanging files via a p2p connection. It's kind of useful, a lot of projects use it in one way or another, but it's unlikely to be instrumental for "the next big thing". The BitTorrent DHT is great for storing and exchanging metadata, but a DHT is not something most people associate with BitTorrent (Bitcoin also has uses a DHT (for client discovery), as do countless other services). Blockchain technology on the other hand offers verifiable distributed timestamping (with ok-ish resolution). That has much wider applicability than just payment tracking (which is essentially all bitcoin does), which is why there's plenty of people exploring what's possible.
tantalor 9y ago
What is this "great filter"?
- Klathmon 9y ago
  Its from the "fermi paradox"[0]. Basically it says that there might not be any other life out there because there is some kind of "event" or "limitation" of life that makes it so that it can only exist for so long, or it is just extremely difficult for life to get past this "filter" (and then there is the question of whether or not that filter is ahead of us, or behind us). In this case, I was trying to use it to ask if there is some kind of "unsolved problem", inherent limitation or issue/problem with torrent networks that prevents their widespread usage. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Filter https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Filter
nailer 9y ago
Perhaps because a lot of content is streamed live? Streaming wants us to download A, B, C, D just in time. Bottorrent (simplified) wants me to download piece P, you to download piece G, then I get P from you and you get G from me. There are Bottorrent streaming apps but they kind of mess with the nature of BT. OTOH things like RPM/Deb/WindowsUpdate etc it would make great sense.
- freeone3000 9y ago
  World of Warcraft (used to?) patch with Bittorrent.
  - pdimitar 9y ago
    All Blizzard games make heavy use of BT-like technology for downloading patches to this day. It's extremely efficient. A 300MB patch to Overwatch downloading with the max speed my ISP is giving me (100 Mbps). It's a matter of 30-40 seconds.
ue_ 9y ago
I wanted to implement a distribured imageboard over bittorrent but I quickly realised it's hard to add data after the initial publication, and further to verify it, and the nature of trackers may make it prone to censorship. So I gave up.
- wongarsu 9y ago
  Distributing the images/posts via bittorrent and the relations between them in the DHT might be the way to go with such a project. On the other hand, the an uncensorable imageboard would profit from the verifiable timestamping of a blockchain, with just the images distributed via a bittorrent-like mechanism. That also gives you a decent anti-spam mechanism (you can post in exchange for mining blocks, similar to the original idea of hash-cash)
  - ue_ 9y ago
    I thought about this too, but one of the features of imageboards is that it doesn't splinter into subthreads, there's a big list of posts, unlike Reddit. And because a post can reply to multiple posts at once, you can't separate them in blockchain forks. If the blockchain forks, it becomes hard to reference posts in the other forks from any particular fork. On the other hand, there has to be a way to avoid downloading (and sharing) certain parts of the chain, for example if someone uploads illegal content, they should have the option to never download that data, so I like the idea of keeping images separate. For posting to be feasible, the time to mine has to be low, though of course it'll increase over time, meaning that either shorter blockchains are favoured for ease of use (nobody wants to wait 5 minutes and waste a lot of power just to make a post) but long enough to make them hard to forge. There's also the issue of segmentation; there's an interest in certain users wanting not to share certain posts, for example people against political issue X may not want to share posts about X. With a small number of peers, this could mean that only one or two peers keeps track of the posts talking about issue X. And then you'd have to trust that you're not downloading illegal content from those people, so if you are committed to anti-censorship but also don't want to download illegal content, you have to trust those peers to only remove illegal content. In the end, I'm not sure if it comes out better than NNTP, or even centralised discussion boards with multiple independent archive sites available (which can archive posts before they are deleted by moderators).
znfi 9y ago
Firstly I think that Bittorrent-style techniques are or have been used in some places even though it may not have been advertised very clearly. For example until a few years ago Spotify used to use something like Bittorrent to reduce the load on their servers. It's just that they didn't really tell anyone who used their product about this, which I honestly felt was kinda bad style. Similarly I heard that Skype used to do something similar, I'm not sure exactly how it worked and apparently it was a pain to maintain so I think it has been scraped as well by now. I think some software updaters do use Bittorrent still, though. If I were to guess, the really big reason for the lack of interest from big corporations is that collecting as much data as possible for use in machine learning is very much in vogue, while at the same time bandwidth seems to be very much a no-issue. Thus there is not much to gain and possible something to lose from employing bittorrent.
rmc 9y ago
I suspect the close association with copyright infringement means that BitTorrent is a little toxic for many corporations.

wongarsu 9y ago

BitTorrent is "just" exchanging files via a p2p connection. It's kind of useful, a lot of projects use it in one way or another, but it's unlikely to be instrumental for "the next big thing". The BitTorrent DHT is great for storing and exchanging metadata, but a DHT is not something most people associate with BitTorrent (Bitcoin also has uses a DHT (for client discovery), as do countless other services). Blockchain technology on the other hand offers verifiable distributed timestamping (with ok-ish resolution). That has much wider applicability than just payment tracking (which is essentially all bitcoin does), which is why there's plenty of people exploring what's possible.

tantalor 9y ago

What is this "great filter"?

Klathmon 9y ago
Its from the "fermi paradox"[0]. Basically it says that there might not be any other life out there because there is some kind of "event" or "limitation" of life that makes it so that it can only exist for so long, or it is just extremely difficult for life to get past this "filter" (and then there is the question of whether or not that filter is ahead of us, or behind us). In this case, I was trying to use it to ask if there is some kind of "unsolved problem", inherent limitation or issue/problem with torrent networks that prevents their widespread usage. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Filter https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Filter

nailer 9y ago

Perhaps because a lot of content is streamed live? Streaming wants us to download A, B, C, D just in time. Bottorrent (simplified) wants me to download piece P, you to download piece G, then I get P from you and you get G from me. There are Bottorrent streaming apps but they kind of mess with the nature of BT. OTOH things like RPM/Deb/WindowsUpdate etc it would make great sense.

freeone3000 9y ago
World of Warcraft (used to?) patch with Bittorrent.
- pdimitar 9y ago
  All Blizzard games make heavy use of BT-like technology for downloading patches to this day. It's extremely efficient. A 300MB patch to Overwatch downloading with the max speed my ISP is giving me (100 Mbps). It's a matter of 30-40 seconds.

ue_ 9y ago

I wanted to implement a distribured imageboard over bittorrent but I quickly realised it's hard to add data after the initial publication, and further to verify it, and the nature of trackers may make it prone to censorship. So I gave up.

wongarsu 9y ago
Distributing the images/posts via bittorrent and the relations between them in the DHT might be the way to go with such a project. On the other hand, the an uncensorable imageboard would profit from the verifiable timestamping of a blockchain, with just the images distributed via a bittorrent-like mechanism. That also gives you a decent anti-spam mechanism (you can post in exchange for mining blocks, similar to the original idea of hash-cash)
- ue_ 9y ago
  I thought about this too, but one of the features of imageboards is that it doesn't splinter into subthreads, there's a big list of posts, unlike Reddit. And because a post can reply to multiple posts at once, you can't separate them in blockchain forks. If the blockchain forks, it becomes hard to reference posts in the other forks from any particular fork. On the other hand, there has to be a way to avoid downloading (and sharing) certain parts of the chain, for example if someone uploads illegal content, they should have the option to never download that data, so I like the idea of keeping images separate. For posting to be feasible, the time to mine has to be low, though of course it'll increase over time, meaning that either shorter blockchains are favoured for ease of use (nobody wants to wait 5 minutes and waste a lot of power just to make a post) but long enough to make them hard to forge. There's also the issue of segmentation; there's an interest in certain users wanting not to share certain posts, for example people against political issue X may not want to share posts about X. With a small number of peers, this could mean that only one or two peers keeps track of the posts talking about issue X. And then you'd have to trust that you're not downloading illegal content from those people, so if you are committed to anti-censorship but also don't want to download illegal content, you have to trust those peers to only remove illegal content. In the end, I'm not sure if it comes out better than NNTP, or even centralised discussion boards with multiple independent archive sites available (which can archive posts before they are deleted by moderators).

znfi 9y ago

Firstly I think that Bittorrent-style techniques are or have been used in some places even though it may not have been advertised very clearly. For example until a few years ago Spotify used to use something like Bittorrent to reduce the load on their servers. It's just that they didn't really tell anyone who used their product about this, which I honestly felt was kinda bad style. Similarly I heard that Skype used to do something similar, I'm not sure exactly how it worked and apparently it was a pain to maintain so I think it has been scraped as well by now. I think some software updaters do use Bittorrent still, though. If I were to guess, the really big reason for the lack of interest from big corporations is that collecting as much data as possible for use in machine learning is very much in vogue, while at the same time bandwidth seems to be very much a no-issue. Thus there is not much to gain and possible something to lose from employing bittorrent.

rmc 9y ago

I suspect the close association with copyright infringement means that BitTorrent is a little toxic for many corporations.