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BitTorrent Turns 20: The File-Sharing Revolution Revisited
- thirdplace_ 5y agoLike IRC, Bittorrent lacks convenience and a nice UX which seems to be required for mass adoption. Most people use dropbox for transferring large files. Some even use email as file transfer if it's below some maximum size (20-50 MB). I have never actually created a torrent and I use the technology mostly for grabbing debian installer images etc.
- dmos62 5y agoI find both IRC and bittorrent to have a superb UX. It's minimal, highly interoperable and programmatically accessible. I've had sketchy experiences getting a connection between two specific peers though. I presumed it was NAT traversal being finnicky.
- dvt 5y ago> I find both IRC and bittorrent to have a superb UX. It's minimal, highly interoperable and programmatically accessible. I agree, but there's no way my mom could figure out IRC on her own. She uses Dropbox daily, though.
- zarzavat 5y agoBefore the WWW ordinary people did figure out IRC. It's just that people have got used to a different kind of UX - arguably what we have now is more complicated and harder to understand.
- kalleboo 5y agoYeah when I was in middle school in the late 90's all the normal girls hung out on IRC using mIRC. What killed IRC was more mobile I think, since once you need to set up a bouncer and stuff it actually gets difficult.
- quesera 5y agoAnyone who can use a web browser can use IRC. E.g. https://kiwiirc.com/nextclient/irc.libera.chat:+6697#irc https://kiwiirc.com/nextclient/irc.libera.chat:+6697#irc https://web.libera.chat/?channels=#irc https://web.libera.chat/?channels=#irc There are also mobile apps with better persistence and even simpler interfaces. IRC will never take over the world because: * The protocol is missing some minor but important UX-enhancing features. This is fixable, but there's nothing valuable enough about the existing userbase for a capitalized entity to bother working with the entrenched groups. And non-capitalized entities move relatively slowly. * There is no profit in it -- the corps who want to own messaging want to own messaging. This is a great idea for them, but a terrible idea for users. * IRC networks don't want Eternal September to happen to them. Not that anyone is beating down their door.
- anthk 5y ago> IRC networks don't want Eternal September to happen to them. Not that anyone is beating down their door. Too late for that. In late 90's/early 00's, you had web clients for IRC.
- IshKebab 5y agoIRC is missing many features that people expect these days though, whereas I don't think Bittorrent is. Bittorrent has definitely done a better job at evolving than IRC has too. E.g. with the DHT, magnet links, webtorrent, etc. IRC doesn't even support basic text formatting, let alone links, images, emojis, threads, etc.
- throwanem 5y agoYou're far from wrong, but I would quibble with a couple of points. Specifically, IRC does support basic text formatting; I've written a client library [1] to implement it. It's not very comprehensive or at all well specified, though. Some clients can handle emoji, links, and images, but it is client-dependent. [1] https://github.com/aaron-em/rcirc-styles.el https://github.com/aaron-em/rcirc-styles.el
- IvanAchlaqullah 5y ago> I've had sketchy experiences getting a connection between two specific peers though. I presumed it was NAT traversal being finnicky. And that is probably are IPv4's flaws, not BitTorrent. If everyone switched to IPv6 then they can connect to each other without using NAT, because IPv6 address space is so big everybody on earth can have their own unique IP address.
- kalleboo 5y agoPeople would still have to open a hole in their firewall, and then we’re back to people implementing UPnP
- IvanAchlaqullah 5y agoAt least on IPv6 people know it's caused by their firewall, which they can fix on their own. On IPv4 you don't know if your packets got dropped because of your firewall blocking some ports, or because ISP's CGNAT get overloaded and decide to drop your packets (and customers can't do anything to fix that)
- AussieWog93 5y ago>Bittorrent lacks convenience and a nice UX which seems to be required for mass adoption. I thought it did have mass adoption. My sister uses it, my Grandpa uses it, and pretty much every single person who watched Game of Thrones back in the day used it too. (There was no way for Australians to watch Game of Thrones legally, the same day it came out in the US, until maybe season 3. Even then it was linked to a $90/month cable TV plan in a country with low cable adoption rates. Hence everybody torrented it and/or shared it with their workmates on USB sticks.)
- Tenoke 5y agoPlenty of people just use putlocker or similar sites when pirating rather than torrents. Especially where I am (Germany) since fines for torrenting are extremely common.
- Andrew_nenakhov 5y agoGermans should vote out the politicians that allow this crap.
- meibo 5y agoAll German parties with even a slight adoption rate want this, not just via lobbying. There's no choice. It's also not a "deal breaker" for a lot of people, same as with recent privacy-unfriendly laws(Bundestrojaner, Vorratsdatenspeicherung, etc).
- AussieWog93 5y agoAre they actually common? I hear stories about it here, but have never come across it IRL. The stories of people having their access limited mostly seems to be PR from industry groups and VPN companies.
- Tenoke 5y agoI know multiple people who've gotten one personally. They are perhaps a bit less common now as less people torrent without a VPN.
- beebeepka 5y agoThis feels like a troll post. Neither IRC, nor BitTorrent have anything to do Dropbox. And both were incredibly popular back in the day
- MikusR 5y agoPeople use Dropbox because you don't need to open ports
- amelius 5y agoThe situation would be different if browsers had it built-in. Perhaps it could be mutually beneficial. If Firefox had a Bittorrent client, both could gain popularity?
- MayeulC 5y agoOh, it's actually very easy to create a torrent, and I used it multiple times to transfer files for, say, a LAN party (games and/or patches). It works much better with a tracker, though. Webtorrent is quite promising for the future, I believe you are looking for something like https://wormhole.app/ https://wormhole.app/ ? It has a few features that other sites lack: resumable uploads, the recipient can start downloading before uploading is finished, no maximum file size (above 5 GB the file isn't stored on the server anymore this is just p2p and need to leave your browser open).
- nailer 5y agoThis is missing an important part of the story. In the early 2000s slashdot.org was similar to what HN is now, with HN having more of a startup vibe and Slashdot having more Linux news. But a very similar audience, checked every day by them. BitTorrent needed a very large scale test. They also needed a group of people technical enough to format BitTorrent and test it, and content he could license (ie that wasn’t pirated) to test it that would appeal to them. So a post appeared on Slashdot: “Free porn”. BitTorrent licensed some very high resolution (way higher than most online video at the time) lesbian porn from lightspeed. All people had to do was install this tool called BitTorrent to get it.
- 2Gkashmiri 5y agoIf there is any file sharing protocol that has so many good memories tied to it in the last 14-16 odd years of using, bittorrent it is.
- opio 5y agoWas libtorrent v2 [0] finally adopted by enough clients and trackers to be used ? I never encountered a magnet link including the "urn:btmh:" (instead of "urn:btih:" for v1), specific to hybrid or full libtorrent v2 torrents. [0] https://blog.libtorrent.org/2020/09/bittorrent-v2/ https://blog.libtorrent.org/2020/09/bittorrent-v2/
- fsflover 5y agoIf you search for anonymous torrenting, check out I2P. This anonymous distributed network includes BitTorrent natively with many trackers.
- sktrdie 5y agoIn my opinion the BitTorrent network, along with the DHT network, holds so much untapped potential. It’s a sea of constantly-changing data. The data is so much more easily shareable compared to HTTP because all you need is a computer and an network connection. No need for a public IP address. Where are the Googles or the Yahoos that harvest this data and make it easily accessible? If these companies made fortunes off the data that we put on HTTP sites (along with all the hurdles that populating a site with data comes with) then imagine how much more potential there is in the BitTorrent market where one can for instance very easily share any kind of info (albeit they must be online at first). Sure now the network is populated by illegal movies and such. But if we populate it with blogs, recipe sites, documentations, videos, etc. a new kind of web can reborn that is more under our control.
- zaik 5y agoTorrents are static and so are their hashes on the DHT. For blogs, recipe sites and say content creators putting a new video on their site every week, this is not very practical esp. when there are no peers to host their content if their computer is offline. IPFS has a similar problem.
- zdkl 5y agoHonestly, I could see this as a pitch for a decent tiktok like service. Your video lives as long as someone somewhere has watched it recently. I might actually enjoy something like that.
- tehlike 5y agoSelling BitTorrent to Justin sun was a big mistake...
- dkarras 5y agoIf bittorrent was invented today, it would probably be tied to a cryptocurrency scheme.
- tiborsaas 5y agoWell, that happened eventually :) https://www.bittorrent.com/token/btt/ https://www.bittorrent.com/token/btt/
- agilob 5y agoShame it happened, it ruined trust in the company when most employees left https://globalcoinreport.com/tron-trx-bittorrent-acquisition-employees-leaving/ https://globalcoinreport.com/tron-trx-bittorrent-acquisition...
- hypertele-Xii 5y agoFortunately BitTorrent the company isn't BitTorrent the protocol. I stopped using the "official" client a long time ago as it grew cancerous.
- reidjs 5y agoFunny you mention that. The altcoin Tronix acquired BitTorrent a few years ago. I didn’t even know BitTorrent was a company until that happened.
- colordrops 5y agoHow did a coin acquire a company? Or is there a company that issues Tronix that acquired the company?
- dannyw 5y agoAs someone who uses private trackers, bear with me for a moment: On private trackers, your download and upload is tracked. You are required to maintain a certain ratio. Most tracker sites allow users to "donate" money to get extra ratio. Most tracker sites allow users to request new files and pay a bounty, in uploads (i.e. ratio). In effect, it is already a currency. Trackers get seized from time to time, and if the entire state of a tracker is stored in a decentralised manner, then seizure is no longer a risk. The dataset stored by a tracker, in the age of magnet links, is very small, and can be replicated amongst all nodes. So, as someone who usually rolls my eyes at people saying "blockchain", this is actually a perfect use for blockchain technology.
- kumarvvr 5y agoBit-torrent was a failure in my opinion. I really wish there was a client / protocol that allowed for sharing of files, but remove control from the user for what to share. Also limit the bandwidth on a monthly basis. Sort of like a global peer-to-peer cloud. It could be used by open source organizations for sharing software and allow everyone to contribute to open source indirectly. Users can designate a fixed size and bandwidth. Then whenever they use their computers, torrents will be running in the background.
- dannyw 5y agoThis has a lot of issues for the user: • their disk space is now taken up by arbitrary files they don't want and can't delete. • some (if not a vast majority) of these files will be child pornography.
- jimbob45 5y agoThere would be benefits too though. CDNs would be marginally less useful lol.
- incrudible 5y agoWhy would I want to relinquish control from what I share? Sounds like a liability nightmare.
- KingMachiavelli 5y agoNot in most western countries. It would be no different than running Tor nodes. Bittorrent is more of a liability nightmare since it's super hard to block on a public network yet easy to record what IPs download certain torrents.
- Macha 5y agoRunning tor exit nodes is a legal liability in many western countries already, so "it's only as risky as tor" is small consolation. You might not get convicted ultimately but the process of explaining why your IP showed up on the access logs of the child porn site they just raided is a problematic enough prospect to scare most people off running an exit node
- 0x0nyandesu 5y agoAmazing that not a single comment mentioned that BitTorrent was made for sharing anime originally and it's first users were all basically fansub groups.
- visarga 5y agoI thought it was originally used to distribute Linux ISO files on release day when FTP servers were drowned in requests. I remember it was a Slashdot thread where people were for the first time trying it and being amazed at the speeds.
- kuroguro 5y agoI believe it's claimed to be originally designed/used by a music sharing community (etree.org) where artists explicitly gave permission.
- aaron695 5y agoI'd say a large part of BitTorrent's success was the mix of capitalism and communism. To maximise your speed you had to share, a mini stock-market on each torrent. Then you were encouraged to continue to share after completion. From memory all the fancy algorithms for sharing didn't really do much and it was just push it out and pull it in as fast as you can that really worked in practice. It was also interesting Bram opposed encryption on the protocol. The global torrent library certainly seems bigger than ever. The biggest issue is upgrading existing media to better resolutions.
- no_time 5y agoI don't understand the importance of encryption in BitTorrent. Correct me if I'm wrong but sharing parties have no way of verifying each other's identity so the whole exchange is vurnable to MitM attacks. Also, file integrity is solved by the torrent metadata you add to the client. I guess it makes it more costly to monitor content as the evil party has to involve itself instead of just monitoring.
- winthrowe 5y agoMy recollection is BitTorrent encryption has mostly nothing to do with real security, and almost everything to do with the cat-and-mouse against ISP middleboxes. Plaintext BitTorrent traffic was highly identifiable and blockable, but even simple obfuscation was enough to avoid them, so simple encryption was adopted.
- aaron695 5y agoYes. It was mostly to stop ISP throttling. Bram's case against was based on the idea ISPs couldn't cache data if you did. Now we know encryption good, combined with things like peerblock it has a ok use. And the caching never happened. Also at the time Skype was the spies messager because encryption was turned on by default, back then people looked suspicious if they encrypted, the extra encrypted data flowing around would have been good.
- est 5y agoI read an interview somewhere few years back that the original BitTorrent was written in Python using an editor called NEdit. http://bittorrent.cvs.sourceforge.net/viewvc/bittorrent/?hideattic=0 http://bittorrent.cvs.sourceforge.net/viewvc/bittorrent/?hid...
- thx 5y agoAbout to sign up for Nord VPN in quest of obtaining some ultra rare bob dylan bootlegs not even sold in most record stores Does anyone have a fav go-to source for torrenting these days? My last longterm success torrenting was with Demonoid but haven’t used it in the past 5 years or so. Any feedback super appreciated
- naveen99 5y agoIPv4 and nat is not the only problem that limits p2p, asymmetrically slower upload speeds , even on fiber are another problem.