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Ask HN: What comes after BitTorrent?
We use to do P2P with Limewire, directly downloading from people's devices.
Next came Soulseek in popularity, directly downloading from people's devices.
Then more than a decade ago, came Bittorrent where you downloaded from the swarm.
What comes next? Are there any next-gen systems being developed to replace bittorrent for file sharing?
- monocasa 8y agoBittorrent is almost two eras here, regular torrent files and magnet links with their associated DHT. Splitting off the metadata to a giant DHT, is a huge (albeit backwards compatible) change. I think that shows why Bittorrent might be here to stay for a while, it's willing to make pretty deep changes to stay with the times.
- eof 8y agoSeems like IPFS potentially?
- y4mi 8y agoIPFS comes to mind. But I doubt anything will displace BitTorrent anytime soon. It's quiet entranched at this point
- CamTin 8y agoI think filesharing is mainly just going to die. Streaming is probably the main perpetrator. Hollywood and the music industry are figuring out how to do digital distribution in such a way that consumers don't feel the need for filesharing. The other is the increasing orwellization of online life, with most computer-mediated interactions and data storage happening in one of a few silos, all of which are cozy with the authorities.
- shawn 8y agoTorrenting too. Getting all the adobe products I need for $35/mo is a perfect fit.
- drivingmenuts 8y agoI'm just not thrilled about the idea of paying rent for software. It's hard living without Adobe, but so far, I'm managing. I have daily withdrawals from Illustrator, though.
- gascan 8y agoWish they had another pricing model. I use Photoshop a few times a year. Would happily pay a little to use it for a few days, and then let it sit cold on my disk for a few months before starting it up again for another small fee.
- larrik 8y agoAdobe pricing hurts a ton when you are a casual user, though.
- newscracker 8y agoMost subscription apps or products are way too expensive for casual users (those who don't make money from using the apps or products). It just starts piling up and could become enormous - one subscription for this, one for that, one for another and so on.
- newscracker 8y agoI've made this observation before. File sharing (with the popular BitTorrent and whatever succeeds it) may diminish in use because of streaming, but will not die in the next decade or two. The streaming space is being fragmented further as time passes, and is killing itself. There are many people who're fed up of having to pay and sign up for yet another streaming service and then breaking their head over what content lives where. Unless the providers get their act together by letting go of the greed to be in control and the greed to make a lot of money — both with fragmentation as the solution — the scene from the last few years and continuing for the next few years only acts as a fuel for file sharing. One doesn't have to think about which provider has what content, with ads or without ads and all that stuff. Just go to your favorite file sharing site and get what you want, when you want and how you want. For video content as well as content that's not massively popular in the population, as it was before, file sharing still provides the best experience and the best choices (content, bandwidth requirement, file sizes, file formats, etc.) for those who know how to use it.
- danmg 8y agoFile sharing existed with the dawn of personal computing, it will exist until it dies.
- shpx 8y agoYou can stream torrents https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Popcorn_Time https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Popcorn_Time
- albertgoeswoof 8y agoBT is still great, and exceptionally good at distributing large, popular files (or groups of files). Why does it need a replacement? IPFS is probably spiritually closer to BT in terms of censorship and content sharing, and could be a valid replacement if the right incentive based sharing applications are built over it. Right now there is little incentive to seek out and add content to IPFS, if that can be cracked then BT could be wiped out by it. However, the trend now for most people is to subscribe to spotify, netflix and amazon prime, thinking there is an endless selection of great and original content. Instead you quickly run out of that and end up listening to and watching whatever the algorithm tells you to.
- sergiotapia 8y agoThere's always something better. There must be something on the horizon. "DOS is still great, Why does it need a replacement?"
- Drakim 8y agoI for one think it's about time we got all our keyboard and mouse replaced by touchscreens and track pads. Newer is better, and things need to be replaced regularly.
- cornholio 8y agoWait, you totally forgot about trackballs. We first need to build a new and shiny trackball into every laptop, and only then replace them all with new and shinny track pads. Let's get that innovation rolling!
- airstrike 8y agoApple is one step ahead of you https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9BnLbv6QYcA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9BnLbv6QYcA
- bluehatbrit 8y ago> There's always something better. There must be something on the horizon. If something is robust and efficient, why does there need to be something new to replace it? It serves the purpose and solves the problem well, why would you replace it with something new simply for the same of something new? DOS isn't a great example, DOS is a much bigger system than something like BT. BT is more of a protocol than a piece of software, and even in that case there are piece of software which have existed for decades without the need to be replaced for the reasons above. New does not mean better, and just because something is old does not mean it's bad or there is something better out there. Perhaps we come up with something that comes after torrents, but we shouldn't do it for the sake of it, it should be because torrents don't work for a use case or we've come up with a faster / more robust way of doing it.
- tacostakohashi 8y agoIPFS looks very hopeful. The documentation is very light on for now though. There are some large organizations that use NFS or AFS in large networks, IPFS looks like a promising replacement, but I think they would need more documentation and stability before considering a switch.
- fyi1183 8y agoThere's torrent via I2P, which provides a different anonymity-vs-performance tradeoff compared to normal BitTorrent. I would say that BitTorrent just fits is particular design constraints fairly well, so I don't see anything replacing it without changing the use case patterns.
- commandocrypto 8y agoHolochain is a validated DHT. I think that's the next big thing
- xemoka 8y agoAlong the same lines as IPFS—and having some similar goals [0]—is the DAT project and related protocols. [0]: https://github.com/datproject/docs/blob/master/docs/faq.md#how-is-dat-different-than-ipfs https://github.com/datproject/docs/blob/master/docs/faq.md#h...
- alex_duf 8y agoTo each network their pros and cons, I think if you look at it from a pirating point of view, torrents seems to tick all the technical boxes. If you talk about it in terms of corporate use / pirating fads / user experience etc. I don't know At this point the success is not technical anymore and will depend on the network effect (pun non intended).
- megaman22 8y agoOnline payment is so much easier, and incredibly more accepted than it was during the wild Napster/Limewire/Torrent days. Companies are finally figuring out that if they just make things available, people will pay for it, too. Network speeds have increased sufficiently that keeping vast local libraries of content the way we used to makes less sense than streaming; I get speeds from Netflix or Amazon comparable or better than I used to get over USB from external hard disks.
- kyriakos 8y agounfortunately companies are still far behind with availability. evident from comparing netflix catalog from different countries. additionally a lot of older more obscure content sometimes can only be found via non legal methods. this is unfortunate but true.
- bhouston 8y agoSo many people I know who are not at all tech savvy buy streaming boxes that offer unlimited free channels. Those things seem to be incredibly popular. This is what has replaced Bittorrent for movie and TV piracy for the masses, or it just enabled piracy when before Bittorrent was just too complex for them. It is now just streamed on demand from a large variety of pirate sites through Kodi and friends. The people using these generally have no clue they are pirating. It is just this box they bought that offers great value. This is what has replaced Bittorrent because it is immediately accessible to the masses for $199 or whatever those boxes cost.
- p1esk 8y agoWhat are these “streaming boxes”? I’ve never heard of Kodi either.
- rrdharan 8y agoThey're very popular in Canada: http://www.cbc.ca/news/business/piracy-iptv-services-live-tv-1.4560320 http://www.cbc.ca/news/business/piracy-iptv-services-live-tv...
- lintroller 8y agoMy anecdotal experience is people using an Android device like an Amazon Fire TV Stick that has these sorts of apps sideloaded to watch movies and TV shows. They are sold around $100 with all the necessary setup already completed, allowing people without the ability to connect to an Android device via adb to stream whatever they want.
- gh02t 8y agoCheap Android boxes running Kodi with a plugin that automatically fetches pirate video streams. Kodi itself is an awesome open source media center that isn't intended to enable piracy, but it supports addons and third parties build plugins that curate pirate streaming sources.
- pfranz 8y agoKodi was formerly XBMC, Xbox Media Center. That homebrew app for the original Xbox.
- pfraze 8y agoThe Beaker browser https://beakerbrowser.com/ https://beakerbrowser.com/ It uses a P2P protocol called Dat, which is similar to BitTorrent but supports changes to the data and realtime streaming https://www.datprotocol.com/ https://www.datprotocol.com/ It's file-sharing mixed into the Web. Beaker uses Dat as a drop-in replacement for HTTP, which means you can browse Dat sites, create new sites within the browser, and use Web APIs to read/write/watch files https://beakerbrowser.com/docs/apis/dat.html https://beakerbrowser.com/docs/apis/dat.html
- nitrohorse 8y agoBeen playing around with Beaker Browser--super cool project!
- bhouston 8y agoThe problem with Bittorrent is that it is not good at lots of individual small files. This is where Google Drive and Dropbox excel (mostly.)
- pfranz 8y agoWhat sort of issues do you have with lots of individual files? Are you talking about bundling them under torrents and dealing with that? Or having trackers handle +1000s of torrents? Is there a self-hosted solution that does? Like IPFS or Dat?
- HelloNurse 8y agoWhen there are lots of small files, you usually want all of them, something that a torrent guarantees and file by file downloads do not. I'm aware that both Google Drive and Dropbox can create zip archives of whole folders, but who guarantees that the content hasn't been deleted or replaced? Integrity is more important than convenience.
- throwaway127439 8y agoI am running big private bittorrent tracker site. BitTorrent is declining year after year, I can see it clearly on my site. New kids/users are using mainly streaming services now. I predict bittorrent will almost fully decline in around a decade in this tempo. If you are asking for movie/tv-series piracy successor then streaming is already taking the bittorrent place. As to apps and games it's only matter of time and they can't be pirated anymore. There is big push to make games stream only + secure enclaves (like on Intel new i7) will make software uncrackable.
- c2h5oh 8y agoThe music and film industries mostly ;-) But jokes aside, I don't see much need for something to replace BitTorrent as a mean of distributing content. Gradual improvements sure, something completely new not really. Where big changes are going to be needed is content discovery - as big torrent search sites disappear it's becoming more apparent they and not the trackers are the weak point.
- amelius 8y agoWhat comes next? It must be Netflix, given the decrease in BitTorrent seeders over the last decade or so.
- newscracker 8y agoI may have some anecdotal data to back this claim that BitTorrent seeders have decreased in the last decade (or more like the last half a decade), but there are plenty of seeders on hundreds, if not thousands, of private sites and trackers. I don't think that has decreased a lot. Maybe someone who has studied this better to state how things have changed.
- izzydata 8y agoImplement the thing they are attempting to make the in the comedy TV series Silicon Valley and have a torrent style decentralized internet. Except use computers as well as phones.
- feross 8y agoWebTorrent (https://webtorrent.io https://webtorrent.io) is the first torrent client that works in the browser. It's written completely in JavaScript – the language of the web – and uses WebRTC for true peer-to-peer transport. No browser plugin, extension, or installation is required. The WebTorrent protocol works just like BitTorrent protocol, except it uses WebRTC instead of TCP/uTP as the transport protocol. Using open web standards, WebTorrent connects website users together to form a distributed, decentralized browser-to-browser network for efficient file transfer.
- thanatropism 8y agoWhy is this good?
- rhardih 8y agoMostly true, except with BitTorrent you get tricks for NAT traversal that WebRTC will never have and failure is an option. It works without a STUN/TURN central server, as long as the swarm is sufficiently connected.
- aepiepaey 8y agoThere's no real incentive for regular BitTorrent clients to spend the development time to add support, because the only ones with something to gain are WebTorrent users. Existing BitTorrent clients, on the other have something to lose: * WebTorrent peers are less likely to be connectible (behind NAT etc.) * WebTorrent peers are more likely to "hit and run" (by navigating away from the page, you stop seeding) * WebTorrent peers are more likely to favor sequential downloads instead of rarest first (for in-browser playback) Being incompatible with regular BitTorrent means it does not get any utility from existing swarms (unless regular BitTorrent clients gain widespread support; unlikely). This means WebTorrent is mostly relevant for content delivery, for use cases a site offloads bandwidth usage onto their uses (like PeerTube, for example), and the site itself always runs a seed.
- gr3yh47 8y agoThere's usenet, and importantly another layer, plex. the future is some people downloading everything and all their friends using their plex
- raldi 8y agoNetflix, HBO, Amazon, and Apple providing music and video at a reasonable price, high quality, and easy to use, while respecting their customers in a way the RIAA and MPAA never did
- sebazzz 8y agoIf it comes to prevention of piracy, I think a lot of torrent sites go underground, behind login or on Tor network.
- danmg 8y agoPeople are always trying out new protocol features and enhancements. Clients ship with the ones that have turned out to be the most useful. In other words, BitTorrent will be the next BitTorrent. Compare modern clients that can easily handle seeding tens of thousands of files across hundreds of different trackers with minimal resource utilization with the reference client people used back in the early 2000s. You only had one way to connect to trackers and other clients, the traffic was trivial to detect and filter, and the client only support one file at a time along with using 100% of a cpu.
- sktrdie 8y agoI honestly think that the idea of letting people search inside a torrent before fully downloading it has been overlooked and might be the next big step in P2P file-sharing: https://github.com/lmatteis/torrent-net https://github.com/lmatteis/torrent-net The idea is that you can actually query stuff inside a torrent; like actually perform an SQL query and only the pieces relevant to the query will be downloaded. This sort of allows for distributed querying if you think about it, since your query could be satisfied by many different peers that are seeding/leeching. Imagine a Web built this way. Where sites are served by people that visit them and are not just static sites, but fully queryable as you'd expect in the normal HTTP web. I wrote more on this here: https://medium.com/@lmatteis/torrentnet-bd4f6dab15e4 https://medium.com/@lmatteis/torrentnet-bd4f6dab15e4
- popman 8y agoThe two things I don't see bittorrent utilized for nowadays are livestreaming, and file matching. Sure, there's some demos of bittorrent live, but it's not hit the mainstream yet. 30-60 second stream delay should be plenty of time to sync video to everybody. File matching would be neat too. Just scan your files against a DHT database and you'll never have to worry about losing them again. Just as long as there's seeds.
- eb0la 8y agoI bet the next Big stuff is Enterprise P2P. Some content providers are using P2P to complement their CDNs with more offnet capilarity (cannot tell details in public). Others like Alibaba are using P2P to syncronize content among servers. Thing of it as a faster and simpler way to have server farm contents un sync. What I'm missing yet is using P2P for configuration, and backup.
- oritll 8y agoBitTorrent spin-off Resilio is doing enterprise P2P. It is the next big thing.
- kosli 8y ago@eb0la is probably right. The trends and challenges in the Enterprise favor p2p solutions to solve several different problem vectors. The first is Scale. Ever greater scale in terms of data, number of endpoints, workflows, locations… you name it. Moore’s law means more computers doing more things at every point in the Enterprise, but especially at the edge. Scaling enterprise systems will be one of the great challenges over the next decade and not just for the web monsters. Everyone will need to contend with scale. The good news is nothing scales like P2P. It’s organic. When every client is also a server, greater scale simply means even more supply and faster speeds. It’s the reason 20 engineers at bittorrent could build software that moves whole percentage points of total Internet traffic (link to recent exabyte blog post?), traffic volume ten or twenty times the size of even the largest websites with thousands of employees and large infrastructure and operating budgets. The second is Reliability. Making workflows reliable is quite expensive with traditional architectures. Building in redundancy for high availability can be very expensive and grossly inefficient in the client-server model. Conversely, P2P is naturally resilient and reliable when there are many potential sources for the data. If one is not available, no problem, pick among the thousands of alternatives. P2P is resilient while remaining efficient in resource utilization. Finally, as mentioned above, there is a growing need to operate at the edge of the network, where resources are spread over a wide area and potentially over low-quality networks. If the experts are right, there will soon be 10 times the data volume at the edge as in the cloud. (see gartner). Managing workflows at the edge of the network will require a centrally managed P2P solution (like Resilio) utilizing a combination of technologies to solve all of the above. Managing Enterprise workflows reliably and at scale, in the cloud or on the edge, favors a p2p solution and you already see it in various IoT, container orchestration and edge computing architectures. Expect to see more.