4 ms·

A torrent with no seeders does not really exist.

by georgyo 5y ago

orangepurple 5y ago
There will be 500 year old seeded torrents
- MontyCarloHall 5y ago
  “There will exist 500 year old actively serviced BBS phone lines” —someone in 1985, probably
  - orangepurple 5y ago
    The thing is there can't be more than one internet, ever. The moment someone invents a new internet, someone will create a gateway to the old internet, and the internet will live on.
    - pjerem 5y ago
      The internet can be highly regulated or the new one can be highly centralized and controlled. The old internet could disappear as long as the economical incentives are enough to transition to a new centralized form of internet. We are far from it, thanks, but don’t neglect that Facebook made a ton of websites become useless (to their owner at least) and disappear. Also, networks operators have made low cost plans limited to some of the internet. This is far from enough to kill the internet but a more restricted network is totally amongst the possibilities. And I’m not even talking about state control like in China.
    - kube-system 5y ago
      This would be true if we only make incremental changes to communications over the next 500 years. I highly suspect we’ll see revolutionary changes that are fundamentally incompatible. Assuming we can always hook up another gateway to the next “internet” is like someone 500 years ago assuming that they could send a message via horse to the internet.
    - austinjp 5y ago
      That's a variation on the Ship of Odysseus. Years pass, nternets come and go, gateways open and close. Does "the Internet" still exist? (Rhetorical question.)
    - MontyCarloHall 5y ago
      “The thing is there can't be more than one phone system, ever. The moment someone invents a new phone system, someone will create a gateway to the old phone system, and the phone system will live on.” Thus far, this is true. The global phone system has persisted for almost 100 years, evolving via numerous “gateways” to older iterations of system (e.g. land lines -> cell phones, copper wires -> microwave links -> fiber optic lines, in-band signaling -> out-of-band signaling, individual lines -> multiplexing, etc.) Yet despite the same phone system evolving and persisting for almost a century, dial-in BBSes, Minitel [0], and other outdated technologies that use phone lines are completely dead. Just because a communications medium may persist for a long time doesn't mean protocols utilizing the medium will. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minitel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minitel
      - necovek 5y ago
        The claim was not about the medium, but about the content ("a 500 year old seeded-torrent"). Phone system has never stored any data (other than the mapping between phone numbers and addresses or, lately, people), and was usually upgraded in a backwards-compatible way. I think that's the important nuance: humans have always had a keen interest in keeping records of history. We are at an early age of electronic computers, but we've already got things like archive.org — that's likely to persist in some shape or form, just like we are actively trying to persist books and movies from different eras. Other than natural or civilizational catastrophes, I only see the risk in the amount of data needing storage surpassing any one's entity ability to archive it, but I am sure "humans" would deal with that in due time too. Edit: I do not necessarily believe the torrent claim, but wanted to clarify why I see a point in it.
  - h2odragon 5y ago
    There's content from those BBS systems still available; so dunno if thats the argument (I think) you think it is.
    - MontyCarloHall 5y ago
      Some (small) amount of content from those BBS systems has been archived elsewhere, but the BBS servers themselves are long dead and cannot be connected to. By analogy, the contents of a few torrents might be archived somewhere 500 years from now, but nobody will be seeding the torrents themselves.
- kube-system 5y ago
  Zero chance, whatsoever. The consumption of media will change over the next 500 years as much or more as they have over the past 500 years.

A torrent with no seeders does not really exist.

orangepurple 5y ago

There will be 500 year old seeded torrents

MontyCarloHall 5y ago
“There will exist 500 year old actively serviced BBS phone lines” —someone in 1985, probably
- orangepurple 5y ago
  The thing is there can't be more than one internet, ever. The moment someone invents a new internet, someone will create a gateway to the old internet, and the internet will live on.
  - pjerem 5y ago
    The internet can be highly regulated or the new one can be highly centralized and controlled. The old internet could disappear as long as the economical incentives are enough to transition to a new centralized form of internet. We are far from it, thanks, but don’t neglect that Facebook made a ton of websites become useless (to their owner at least) and disappear. Also, networks operators have made low cost plans limited to some of the internet. This is far from enough to kill the internet but a more restricted network is totally amongst the possibilities. And I’m not even talking about state control like in China.
  - kube-system 5y ago
    This would be true if we only make incremental changes to communications over the next 500 years. I highly suspect we’ll see revolutionary changes that are fundamentally incompatible. Assuming we can always hook up another gateway to the next “internet” is like someone 500 years ago assuming that they could send a message via horse to the internet.
  - austinjp 5y ago
    That's a variation on the Ship of Odysseus. Years pass, nternets come and go, gateways open and close. Does "the Internet" still exist? (Rhetorical question.)
  - MontyCarloHall 5y ago
    “The thing is there can't be more than one phone system, ever. The moment someone invents a new phone system, someone will create a gateway to the old phone system, and the phone system will live on.” Thus far, this is true. The global phone system has persisted for almost 100 years, evolving via numerous “gateways” to older iterations of system (e.g. land lines -> cell phones, copper wires -> microwave links -> fiber optic lines, in-band signaling -> out-of-band signaling, individual lines -> multiplexing, etc.) Yet despite the same phone system evolving and persisting for almost a century, dial-in BBSes, Minitel [0], and other outdated technologies that use phone lines are completely dead. Just because a communications medium may persist for a long time doesn't mean protocols utilizing the medium will. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minitel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minitel
    - necovek 5y ago
      The claim was not about the medium, but about the content ("a 500 year old seeded-torrent"). Phone system has never stored any data (other than the mapping between phone numbers and addresses or, lately, people), and was usually upgraded in a backwards-compatible way. I think that's the important nuance: humans have always had a keen interest in keeping records of history. We are at an early age of electronic computers, but we've already got things like archive.org — that's likely to persist in some shape or form, just like we are actively trying to persist books and movies from different eras. Other than natural or civilizational catastrophes, I only see the risk in the amount of data needing storage surpassing any one's entity ability to archive it, but I am sure "humans" would deal with that in due time too. Edit: I do not necessarily believe the torrent claim, but wanted to clarify why I see a point in it.
- h2odragon 5y ago
  There's content from those BBS systems still available; so dunno if thats the argument (I think) you think it is.
  - MontyCarloHall 5y ago
    Some (small) amount of content from those BBS systems has been archived elsewhere, but the BBS servers themselves are long dead and cannot be connected to. By analogy, the contents of a few torrents might be archived somewhere 500 years from now, but nobody will be seeding the torrents themselves.
kube-system 5y ago
Zero chance, whatsoever. The consumption of media will change over the next 500 years as much or more as they have over the past 500 years.