7 ms·

BitTorrent is amazing. It just works. Anyone anywhere can create a torrent of their files, dump the magnet link somewhere, and everyone else can reliably retrie

BitTorrent is amazing. It just works. Anyone anywhere can create a torrent of their files, dump the magnet link somewhere, and everyone else can reliably retrieve it. It is self-reinforcing; the more people using a torrent, the better the robustness, redundancy and download speeds. You can often get better speeds from downloading something via torrent than from a web server. It's an open protocol that is relatively easy to implement, it has a diversity of lightweight clients for all OSes and is fairly resistant to censorship. To me it's pretty much perfect tech that solves a real problem. I hope Bram Cohen got rich off of it somehow.

johnx123-up 5y ago
I'd add uTorrent... it was created in few kb and AFAIK that started the no-bloatware awareness for sometime.
- stavros 5y ago
  I don't know if it started the no-bloatware awareness, that was a remnant of the 90s, where programs were non-bloated by default (with Winamp being the most non-bloated program to ever have been created).
  - glenstein 5y ago
    Even just in the universe of piracy programs, Kazaa and it's offshoots got bloated, so Kazaa lite became the no-bloat version of that
Buttons840 5y ago
Wish browsers had built in support for it. Imagine if by default most downloads were through BitTorrent, and your browser would then seed the file for 1.5x the download size and time.
- toomuchtodo 5y ago
  WebTorrent gets you pretty close. https://webtorrent.io/ https://webtorrent.io/
- bajsejohannes 5y ago
  The Opera browser did for a short while. If I recall correctly, it was taken out since sysadmins at schools, workplaces, etc would ban the browser. Of course that behavior unfortunately ensured that bittorrent would remain a protocol mostly for piracy.
- redthrowaway 5y ago
  Brave supports bittorrent natively and is basically a reskinned Chrome without the spyware.
  - Fnoord 5y ago
    ..but includes a cryptocurrency scam scheme.
- squarefoot 5y ago
  Support in the browser would require the browser to stay on the whole time, along with the computer. Bittorrent clients are better run on small less power hungry boards (RPi, etc.) or on hardware that is meant to be running 24/7 anyway. For example, I run the Transmission daemon on my XigmaNAS home file server. The NAS is headless, but I can control the daemon through its remote GUI, so as soon as I click on a torrent or magnet link on the browser, it calls the local Transmission GUI which sends the info to the client on the NAS which starts the download freeing the browser and the PC of any further work. https://xigmanas.com/xnaswp/ https://xigmanas.com/xnaswp/ https://github.com/transmission-remote-gui/transgui https://github.com/transmission-remote-gui/transgui
  - ycombinete 5y ago
    I don’t know about others, but my browser is open about 100% of the time
    - Lhiw 5y ago
      Yea this was a super weird complaint. My browser is open for far more time than my torrent app.
  - sleavey 5y ago
    It doesn't require the browser to be always on, unless you want to download something (which is the same as a normal download). Do you mean it's better for the health of the swarm for a particular file? Otherwise I'm not sure I get your point.
    - squarefoot 5y ago
      > Do you mean it's better for the health of the swarm for a particular file? That is one of the main points. Some files are shared by thousands users and can be downloaded in seconds, but others are much harder to find, so that I like to keep the client on to help other people getting it quickly. I usually am annoyed when a file with a single seed reaches like 97% then it dies until the following day because the seeder had to turn off the PC, so I try to avoid this, especially since it costs me nothing as broadband is flat and the client runs on a machine that is always on.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- no_time 5y ago
  A major browser supporting torrents would be a disaster for public torrent culture. Since everyone closes their browsers, people would seed substantially less. I have a theory that a good chunk of people seeding any given torrent on a public tracker are doing it unintentionally. EDIT: closes their browser is a bad way to phrase it. The problem is that the fact that they are seeding would be more in their face instead of hidden away in a notification icon on hover. I wonder if intellectually "property" groups thought of this playing out.
  - 5350-uiop-1130 5y ago
    > a good chunk of people seeding any given torrent on a public tracker are doing it unintentionally. a person i know (totally not me) only seeds the rarer things. for more popular stuff they only seed for a couple of days.
- als0 5y ago
  BitTorrent itself doesn't provide any privacy, which is critical for something like a web browser. If anyone in the world can query what you've downloaded, it can escalate into real issues.
- swissfunicular 5y ago
  Brave Browser has it
- technobabbler 5y ago
  This would cripple home internet connections, where the upstream is usually a tiny fraction of the downstream bandwidth. Most of the stuff people download is created/hosted by big companies. Let them pay for bandwidth instead of individual home users (looking at you, Blizzard and other game companies who like to use torrents to distribute patches).
  - LargoLasskhyfv 5y ago
    I'll give you some technobabble: traffic shaping, ack-priorization, quality of service, traffic class. All things which your home gateway should have in one form, or another, where you designate torrenting a priority which doesn't interfere with the rest of your activities. And adapting dynamically. No need to think about how to slice available bandwith into pieces beforehand.
    - technobabbler 5y ago
      Nice in theory, but as far as I've seen, most home routers and devices don't utilize those, and most users don't know how to configure them, and the up/down ratio is so vast (like mine is 1000/20, a 50x difference) that it's hard to saturate the down without first maxing the up in a torrent. The exception to that is it you happen to get some phat-piped seeds who are willing to send to you super fast even if you're uploading at a trickle. But in that case, plain old HTTP would've worked better anyway. At the end of the day the bottleneck isn't at the protocol level, but the asymmetry of home cable connections. Torrents are great when you have symmetric fiber, but very few homes do right now.
dsizzle 5y ago
Honest question: how much of the torrent content is corrupted in some way? I dabbled with file sharing back when Kazaa was a thing and I infected my computer to the point I had to reinstall the operating system and I "learned my lesson." But maybe I overlearned the lesson, and it can be used reliably?
- boomboomsubban 5y ago
  Kazaaa has nothing to do with torrents, but what do you mean by corrupted? Torrenting can cause a fragmenting issue, but defragging clears that up. And like anywhere else, random executables sometimes contain malware but there's nothing inherent in torrents that makes that more likely.
  - dsizzle 5y ago
    I meant “file sharing” more generally not “torrents” specifically (I edited my previous comment). I don’t know what exactly happened to my computer but I suspect malware. While not inherent to torrents, it does seem inherent in sharing of random executables. Have the trust issues improved? What are some good use cases of torrents?
    - lostcolony 5y ago
      So while Kazaa and the like eventually got the ability to actually download from multiple sources, and be able to see that a particular source is popular, as I recall from the early 2000 days, back then it was pure point to point. That is, if you chose to download something, you also were implicitly choosing what source to download it from. So even if five people had the file "Foo", you chose which one to download, and there was no way to know that 4 had the same file "Foo", and 1 person had something else, with no way to know which was what you wanted. Torrents avoid many of those issues; you can see how many seeds a file has (though Kazaa and the like later added that). And you had to have gotten the magnet link from somewhere, which would have its own evaluatable trust. It's the difference between downloading file called "Foo" from random internet user's computer, and going to a website, that you know, and downloading a file called "Foo" that you also know has been downloaded, and retained, by X number of users.
mkj 5y ago
I'd assume he got rich off Chia - not nearly as elegant as bittorrent.
johnnyApplePRNG 5y ago
I don't think he did unfortunately. He's currently creating a cryptocurrency.
jiggunjer 5y ago
Why this over ipfs?
- 0x264 5y ago
  BitTorrent is 20 years old, IPFS only 6. So, might just come down to familiarity. Definitively many more people, even outside tech crowd, have heard of BitTorrent whereas IPFS is still mostly unknown.
- 5e92cb50239222b 5y ago
  Because I pushed petabytes of data over it for the past 15 years and it never failed me, not once. Simple as that.
  - patentatt 5y ago
    One benefit of ipfs is that you can use cloud flare as a gateway, which is pretty cool. Don't know of anything similar for torrents (from a reputable company).
- dpflug 5y ago
  Speaking from my own experience, I've had a harder time getting data from here to there via ipfs. It's been a year or two since I last tried, but as I recall my troubles were the following: * Transfers never starting, or not being able to exceed kbps. * Large amounts of data makes client performance worse. * Adding data to the store doubles the disk space used unless you take extra steps to mitigate that. Meanwhile, I can point mktorrent at a folder, load it in my clients, and have it saturate my link within seconds/a couple minutes. I'm keeping a close eye on IPFS and the Dat Project to take over here (and my use of Syncthing), but I'm hoping some refinement can happen first.
EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK 5y ago
But you also need to find the file first. And sites to search for files are unreliable, often get banned. I remember long before bit torrent there were protocols like napster, edonkey, imesh etc that included search function and were superior to bit torrent in this aspect. Unfortunately, bad design won.
- urbanmiffs 5y ago
  Qbittorrent client has a built in search engine. Add the jackett plugin and you can search every public tracker in one click. I haven't visited a torrent site in years.
  - klntsky 5y ago
    This is cool, but unfortunately the best content is on private trackers (you also need them to reduce the risk of abuse reports to your provider). Not sure if the need to use private trackers can be fixed by the protocol, though. But, maybe adding a bit more of anonymity would be enough? i2p torrents provide that, but sacrifice speed. Clearly it's a spectrum and we need more "points" in the middle of it.
    - urbanmiffs 5y ago
      I disagree completely. I downloaded my first torrent months after the first client was released and my latest yesterday. In those 17 years I've never failed to find what I need and never had any problems with ISP(and would use a VPN if I did). I've never felt the need to check out private trackers.
    - urbanmiffs 5y ago
      I disagree completely. I downloaded my first torrent months after the first client was released and my latest yesterday. In those 20 years I've never failed to find what I need and never had any problems with ISP(and would use a VPN if I did). I've never felt the need to check out private trackers.
      - 5y ago

johnx123-up 5y ago

I'd add uTorrent... it was created in few kb and AFAIK that started the no-bloatware awareness for sometime.

stavros 5y ago
I don't know if it started the no-bloatware awareness, that was a remnant of the 90s, where programs were non-bloated by default (with Winamp being the most non-bloated program to ever have been created).
- glenstein 5y ago
  Even just in the universe of piracy programs, Kazaa and it's offshoots got bloated, so Kazaa lite became the no-bloat version of that

Buttons840 5y ago

Wish browsers had built in support for it. Imagine if by default most downloads were through BitTorrent, and your browser would then seed the file for 1.5x the download size and time.

toomuchtodo 5y ago
WebTorrent gets you pretty close. https://webtorrent.io/ https://webtorrent.io/
bajsejohannes 5y ago
The Opera browser did for a short while. If I recall correctly, it was taken out since sysadmins at schools, workplaces, etc would ban the browser. Of course that behavior unfortunately ensured that bittorrent would remain a protocol mostly for piracy.
redthrowaway 5y ago
Brave supports bittorrent natively and is basically a reskinned Chrome without the spyware.
- Fnoord 5y ago
  ..but includes a cryptocurrency scam scheme.
squarefoot 5y ago
Support in the browser would require the browser to stay on the whole time, along with the computer. Bittorrent clients are better run on small less power hungry boards (RPi, etc.) or on hardware that is meant to be running 24/7 anyway. For example, I run the Transmission daemon on my XigmaNAS home file server. The NAS is headless, but I can control the daemon through its remote GUI, so as soon as I click on a torrent or magnet link on the browser, it calls the local Transmission GUI which sends the info to the client on the NAS which starts the download freeing the browser and the PC of any further work. https://xigmanas.com/xnaswp/ https://xigmanas.com/xnaswp/ https://github.com/transmission-remote-gui/transgui https://github.com/transmission-remote-gui/transgui
- ycombinete 5y ago
  I don’t know about others, but my browser is open about 100% of the time
  - Lhiw 5y ago
    Yea this was a super weird complaint. My browser is open for far more time than my torrent app.
- sleavey 5y ago
  It doesn't require the browser to be always on, unless you want to download something (which is the same as a normal download). Do you mean it's better for the health of the swarm for a particular file? Otherwise I'm not sure I get your point.
  - squarefoot 5y ago
    > Do you mean it's better for the health of the swarm for a particular file? That is one of the main points. Some files are shared by thousands users and can be downloaded in seconds, but others are much harder to find, so that I like to keep the client on to help other people getting it quickly. I usually am annoyed when a file with a single seed reaches like 97% then it dies until the following day because the seeder had to turn off the PC, so I try to avoid this, especially since it costs me nothing as broadband is flat and the client runs on a machine that is always on.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
no_time 5y ago
A major browser supporting torrents would be a disaster for public torrent culture. Since everyone closes their browsers, people would seed substantially less. I have a theory that a good chunk of people seeding any given torrent on a public tracker are doing it unintentionally. EDIT: closes their browser is a bad way to phrase it. The problem is that the fact that they are seeding would be more in their face instead of hidden away in a notification icon on hover. I wonder if intellectually "property" groups thought of this playing out.
- 5350-uiop-1130 5y ago
  > a good chunk of people seeding any given torrent on a public tracker are doing it unintentionally. a person i know (totally not me) only seeds the rarer things. for more popular stuff they only seed for a couple of days.
als0 5y ago
BitTorrent itself doesn't provide any privacy, which is critical for something like a web browser. If anyone in the world can query what you've downloaded, it can escalate into real issues.
swissfunicular 5y ago
Brave Browser has it
technobabbler 5y ago
This would cripple home internet connections, where the upstream is usually a tiny fraction of the downstream bandwidth. Most of the stuff people download is created/hosted by big companies. Let them pay for bandwidth instead of individual home users (looking at you, Blizzard and other game companies who like to use torrents to distribute patches).
- LargoLasskhyfv 5y ago
  I'll give you some technobabble: traffic shaping, ack-priorization, quality of service, traffic class. All things which your home gateway should have in one form, or another, where you designate torrenting a priority which doesn't interfere with the rest of your activities. And adapting dynamically. No need to think about how to slice available bandwith into pieces beforehand.
  - technobabbler 5y ago
    Nice in theory, but as far as I've seen, most home routers and devices don't utilize those, and most users don't know how to configure them, and the up/down ratio is so vast (like mine is 1000/20, a 50x difference) that it's hard to saturate the down without first maxing the up in a torrent. The exception to that is it you happen to get some phat-piped seeds who are willing to send to you super fast even if you're uploading at a trickle. But in that case, plain old HTTP would've worked better anyway. At the end of the day the bottleneck isn't at the protocol level, but the asymmetry of home cable connections. Torrents are great when you have symmetric fiber, but very few homes do right now.

dsizzle 5y ago

Honest question: how much of the torrent content is corrupted in some way? I dabbled with file sharing back when Kazaa was a thing and I infected my computer to the point I had to reinstall the operating system and I "learned my lesson." But maybe I overlearned the lesson, and it can be used reliably?

boomboomsubban 5y ago
Kazaaa has nothing to do with torrents, but what do you mean by corrupted? Torrenting can cause a fragmenting issue, but defragging clears that up. And like anywhere else, random executables sometimes contain malware but there's nothing inherent in torrents that makes that more likely.
- dsizzle 5y ago
  I meant “file sharing” more generally not “torrents” specifically (I edited my previous comment). I don’t know what exactly happened to my computer but I suspect malware. While not inherent to torrents, it does seem inherent in sharing of random executables. Have the trust issues improved? What are some good use cases of torrents?
  - lostcolony 5y ago
    So while Kazaa and the like eventually got the ability to actually download from multiple sources, and be able to see that a particular source is popular, as I recall from the early 2000 days, back then it was pure point to point. That is, if you chose to download something, you also were implicitly choosing what source to download it from. So even if five people had the file "Foo", you chose which one to download, and there was no way to know that 4 had the same file "Foo", and 1 person had something else, with no way to know which was what you wanted. Torrents avoid many of those issues; you can see how many seeds a file has (though Kazaa and the like later added that). And you had to have gotten the magnet link from somewhere, which would have its own evaluatable trust. It's the difference between downloading file called "Foo" from random internet user's computer, and going to a website, that you know, and downloading a file called "Foo" that you also know has been downloaded, and retained, by X number of users.

mkj 5y ago

I'd assume he got rich off Chia - not nearly as elegant as bittorrent.

johnnyApplePRNG 5y ago

I don't think he did unfortunately. He's currently creating a cryptocurrency.

jiggunjer 5y ago

Why this over ipfs?

0x264 5y ago
BitTorrent is 20 years old, IPFS only 6. So, might just come down to familiarity. Definitively many more people, even outside tech crowd, have heard of BitTorrent whereas IPFS is still mostly unknown.
5e92cb50239222b 5y ago
Because I pushed petabytes of data over it for the past 15 years and it never failed me, not once. Simple as that.
- patentatt 5y ago
  One benefit of ipfs is that you can use cloud flare as a gateway, which is pretty cool. Don't know of anything similar for torrents (from a reputable company).
dpflug 5y ago
Speaking from my own experience, I've had a harder time getting data from here to there via ipfs. It's been a year or two since I last tried, but as I recall my troubles were the following: * Transfers never starting, or not being able to exceed kbps. * Large amounts of data makes client performance worse. * Adding data to the store doubles the disk space used unless you take extra steps to mitigate that. Meanwhile, I can point mktorrent at a folder, load it in my clients, and have it saturate my link within seconds/a couple minutes. I'm keeping a close eye on IPFS and the Dat Project to take over here (and my use of Syncthing), but I'm hoping some refinement can happen first.

EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK 5y ago

But you also need to find the file first. And sites to search for files are unreliable, often get banned. I remember long before bit torrent there were protocols like napster, edonkey, imesh etc that included search function and were superior to bit torrent in this aspect. Unfortunately, bad design won.

urbanmiffs 5y ago
Qbittorrent client has a built in search engine. Add the jackett plugin and you can search every public tracker in one click. I haven't visited a torrent site in years.
- klntsky 5y ago
  This is cool, but unfortunately the best content is on private trackers (you also need them to reduce the risk of abuse reports to your provider). Not sure if the need to use private trackers can be fixed by the protocol, though. But, maybe adding a bit more of anonymity would be enough? i2p torrents provide that, but sacrifice speed. Clearly it's a spectrum and we need more "points" in the middle of it.
  - urbanmiffs 5y ago
    I disagree completely. I downloaded my first torrent months after the first client was released and my latest yesterday. In those 17 years I've never failed to find what I need and never had any problems with ISP(and would use a VPN if I did). I've never felt the need to check out private trackers.
  - urbanmiffs 5y ago
    I disagree completely. I downloaded my first torrent months after the first client was released and my latest yesterday. In those 20 years I've never failed to find what I need and never had any problems with ISP(and would use a VPN if I did). I've never felt the need to check out private trackers.
    - 5y ago