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Do I understand it correctly, that torrents are sent directly from user to user and that the Pirate Bay is only needed so the users find each other? Like someo
by TekMol 6y ago
Do I understand it correctly, that torrents are sent directly from user to user and that the Pirate Bay is only needed so the users find each other?
Like someone wants to know "Which user that is online now has The Matrix?" and then queries PB to get IPs of such users?
- toomuchtodo 6y agoCorrect, the Pirate Bay simply hosts magnet links, which contain cryptographic hashes for the torrent contents and where to bootstrap the transfer from. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnet_URI_scheme https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnet_URI_scheme
- magicalhippo 6y agoIt's based on Kademlia[1], a distributed hash table for P2P networks. It's pretty neat, and used by other software as well. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kademlia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kademlia
- TheJoeMan 6y agoThat’s what’s so crazy, TPB doesn’t host or distribute any content. All they do is serve you a “magnet link” which means when you put “Titanic” in the search box they give you a string that uniquely identifies one specific copy of the movie. You then paste it into other peer-to-peer software.
- the_pwner224 6y agoNo, TPB doesn't do that. Normally you would have a .torrent file which is a small file containing metadata (name, files in torrent) and a list of trackers which are servers that keep track of the peers. You acquire a .torrent, open it with a torrent client, and it connects to the trackers to get a list of peers and start p2p sharing. Peers can also directly exchange more peer information when connected. Instead of a .torrent file you can instead use a magnet link which is a magnet://... that contains the same information. TBP hosts a lot of magnet links. Basically like if you made a webpage with a list of a bunch of hyperlinks to websites like google.com, and allowed people to submit more hyperlinks. You're not distributing the google.com page content, just links to the location of the information. Except instead of links that tell you where to find http webpages it's links that tell you where to find a torrent.
- manigandham 6y agoPirate Bay is only needed to find the metadata for a given torrent so that users can then find each other.