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> Ever wondered about how you can find the torrent seeders without a centralized entity? The Bittorrent DHT is the underlying tech. The Bittorrent DHT is not f
by progval 7y ago
> Ever wondered about how you can find the torrent seeders without a centralized entity? The Bittorrent DHT is the underlying tech.
The Bittorrent DHT is not fully decentralized, it needs a list of hardcoded bootstrap nodes. https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1181301/how-does-a-dht-in-a-bittorent-client-get-bootstrapped https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1181301/how-does-a-dht-i...
- kortilla 7y agoWhich can easily be changed. The bootstrap nodes don’t hold any special power.
- pcr910303 7y agoWell, it's for ease-of-use. Anyone can make an alternative DHT with their own bootstrap nodes, but the Bittorrent main one is the biggest, therefore most programs have that one hard-coded. Anyone can make an alternative client that uses the exactly same tech with different bootstrap nodes, and once they gain popularity, there will be people using that. Democratic, I would say.
- sliken 7y agoYes, sort of. That's one way to get peers, but clients support other ways to peers. So in practice you can get peers from the list of previous peers, PEX (peer exchange), or a tracker for a given torrent. So in practice once you talk to a few bittorrent peers (of millions) you likely are talking to another DHT peer and can bootstrap. Also given that there's typically millions of peers in the DHT, even brute forcing it by search IPv4 (4 billion addresses) for a few million peers is likely to only involve a few 1000 UDP packets or so.