3 ms·
It was never private. In BitTorrent, IP addresses are public. Trackers help peers match with each other, but trackerless mechanisms have been introduced not lon
by niftich 9y ago
It was never private. In BitTorrent, IP addresses are public. Trackers help peers match with each other, but trackerless mechanisms have been introduced not long after, and this keeps a distributed datastore "in the cloud", distributed among participating peers.
Any peer, whether a real downloader, or purposedly written to just crawl the DHT, can obtain IP addresses for peers who have relevant pieces, and aggregate this information over a long time.