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I'd add ransomware payments to the list, but otherwise your take "the problem was found back in 2011 - it's just that nobody wants to admit it" is spot-on! An

I'd add ransomware payments to the list, but otherwise your take "the problem was found back in 2011 - it's just that nobody wants to admit it" is spot-on! An interesting tangent of your BitTorrent analogy is that, for BitTorrent the protocol, an actually legal use case was found later: it is now used to create powerful ad-hoc CDNs for limited use cases with the novel property of gaining bandwidth automatically as more clients show up. The "Linux ISOs" that actually existed were the earliest incarnation of this, driven by non-profit orgs low on cash, but the concept is now in active use also for purely commercial purposes such as downloading large game updates (World of Warcraft, StarCraft 2 etc. have been using this scheme for a long time now) or generally distributing large software packages to a bunch of clients (I've read about at least one company-proprietary project that uses BitTorrent embedded in some kind of software package distribution system to quickly roll out microservice updates in a mesh made up of thousands of servers). This may mean that it's not impossible for some of the crypto protocols to eventually end up being used for actual benefit in some legal way that is not just again financial speculation. However, it will probably be much less world-changing than the crypto enthusiasts expect.

jasongi 5y ago
I would consider ransomware under the umbrella of black markets. Perhaps "anything illegal" would have been a better description. Nice point about BitTorrent. I'm sure crypto will have some niche adoptions in the future too. Apparently P2P game updates ended up being disabled though. Probably a good thing too - imagine the absolute carnage on ISPs if places like netflix decided to outsource their CDN to everyone's home internet. https://web.archive.org/web/20160715104054/https://us.battle.net/forums/en/bnet/topic/16283439122 https://web.archive.org/web/20160715104054/https://us.battle...
- dspillett 5y ago
  > Apparently P2P game updates ended up being disabled though. Probably a good thing too - imagine the absolute carnage on ISPs if places like netflix decided to outsource their CDN to everyone's home internet. Given how asymmetric many home connections are, and were more so further back, and that using the whole upstream will effectively throttle downstream & there is no reliable way to detect at what throughput you will become a problem, I never saw P2P game updates as a good idea in general. Excellent for those behind the same bottleneck though - two PCs in the same student digs updating the same huge game for instance, saving a second slow download using the orders-of-magnitude faster local LAN - but I don't think that is a common enough use case to be worth the implementation effort.
  - shard 5y ago
    I just recently noticed the delivery optimization feature in Windows 10. It sounds similar to what you are saying, sending Windows update to other PCs on the local network.
    - dspillett 5y ago
      Yes. It makes more sense for something as ubiquitous as Windows, for which multiple devices running the same product on the same local subnet is a norm rather than a relatively rare exception.
Thlom 5y ago
At my last workplace we used BitTorrent to distribute content to thousands of sites. The endpoints were not ‘seeding’, the main reason for us to use it was the splitting of files into pieces and the automatic checksumming of the content. Quite convenient when the content could be several hundred GB.

jasongi 5y ago

I would consider ransomware under the umbrella of black markets. Perhaps "anything illegal" would have been a better description. Nice point about BitTorrent. I'm sure crypto will have some niche adoptions in the future too. Apparently P2P game updates ended up being disabled though. Probably a good thing too - imagine the absolute carnage on ISPs if places like netflix decided to outsource their CDN to everyone's home internet. https://web.archive.org/web/20160715104054/https://us.battle.net/forums/en/bnet/topic/16283439122 https://web.archive.org/web/20160715104054/https://us.battle...

dspillett 5y ago
> Apparently P2P game updates ended up being disabled though. Probably a good thing too - imagine the absolute carnage on ISPs if places like netflix decided to outsource their CDN to everyone's home internet. Given how asymmetric many home connections are, and were more so further back, and that using the whole upstream will effectively throttle downstream & there is no reliable way to detect at what throughput you will become a problem, I never saw P2P game updates as a good idea in general. Excellent for those behind the same bottleneck though - two PCs in the same student digs updating the same huge game for instance, saving a second slow download using the orders-of-magnitude faster local LAN - but I don't think that is a common enough use case to be worth the implementation effort.
- shard 5y ago
  I just recently noticed the delivery optimization feature in Windows 10. It sounds similar to what you are saying, sending Windows update to other PCs on the local network.
  - dspillett 5y ago
    Yes. It makes more sense for something as ubiquitous as Windows, for which multiple devices running the same product on the same local subnet is a norm rather than a relatively rare exception.

Thlom 5y ago

At my last workplace we used BitTorrent to distribute content to thousands of sites. The endpoints were not ‘seeding’, the main reason for us to use it was the splitting of files into pieces and the automatic checksumming of the content. Quite convenient when the content could be several hundred GB.