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BitTorrent was one of the few things that once I understood how it worked, I realized I was looking at the product of true genius.
by DevX101 6y ago
BitTorrent was one of the few things that once I understood how it worked, I realized I was looking at the product of true genius.
- martinald 6y agoReally? It's a just an iteration from how eDonkey2000/eMule worked, which actually also had a DHT based 'trackeless' mode, many years before BT came around.
- bawolff 6y agoThe tit-for-tat algorithm is what makes bit torrent special and solved a real problem with the previous gnutella-esque generation of p2p file sharing programs. As far as i know emule did not have that at the time.
- StavrosK 6y agoHow does tit-for-tat work? Is it still enabled? I don't think I've seen it much lately.
- gruez 6y agoIt's implemented in the choking algorithm. Basically if bandwidth or upload slots are limited, your peer with preferentially upload to peers that have reciprocated to you. AFAIK most clients implement this.
- StavrosK 6y agoInteresting, thanks!
- londons_explore 6y agoIt isn't so important now most people have fast enough internet. Back when people left things downloading for days, there were severe shortages of people willing to upload, and tit-for-tat encouraged uploading, solving the issue.
- tinus_hn 6y agoBitTorrent uses TCP properly instead of implementing a poor version of TCP using UDP which is why it is much faster than eDonkey.
- sneak 6y agoThe first time I ever felt that way was with the Gnutella network; I instantly wrote a client for it from scratch. Bittorrent only became that level of magical for me when the DHT got factored in some time later and magnet links became workable. The other time was Bitcoin. I’m a big fan of lack of centralized/coordination/tracker nodes.
- octoberfranklin 6y agoI know that feeling; I first got it reading this paper by some guy named Nakamoto.