I recently came across an article on TorrentFreak about the BitTorrent protocol and found myself wondering if it has remained relevant in today’s digital landscape. Given the rapid advancements in technology, I was curious to know if BitTorrent has been surpassed by a more efficient protocol, or if it continues to hold its ground (like I2P?).
When I want to pirate, torrenting is my go to. I don’t do it very often, so I’m not really up-to-date on more modern methods. For some movies, I know there are those websites like 123movies or whatever. And I’ve used those. But Idek what additional methods there are anymore.
That said, I’ve tried torrenting over I2P, but it’s just slow. Not necessarily super slow, but obviously slower than doing it over the clearweb with a commercial VPN. Additionally it seems like there’s less available content with torrenting over I2P. At least in the little experience I’ve had with it.
I don’t really care. You should be using a VPN for torrents anyways. I mostly pirate movies and TV shows so there nearly zero malware risk as long as the system and the VLC is up to date.
The official site is the🏴☠️bay[dot]org
🏴☠️ is a singular word, don’t add an “s” for no reason.
I wish there were some way to enable availability to persist even when torrents’ peak of popularity has passed - some kind of decentralized, self-healing archive where a torrent’s minimal presence on the network was maintained. Old torrents then could become slow but the archival system would prevent them being lost completely, while distributing storage efficiently. Maybe this isn’t practical in terms of storage, but the tendency of bittorrent to lose older content can be frustrating.
I don’t see what you can do at the protocol level to improve availability, you still need people storing the file and acting as peers. Some trackers try to improve that by incentivizing long term seeding.
Meh… I get itchy when I hear private. We could also improve the experience for seeding publicly and for longer. Not only by education but maybe even using some kind of intensive to keep seeding.
The issue is that public trackers are too easy for people to monitor and pursue copyright infringement claims for. Private trackers, by design, are much harder to do that with, which makes them leaps and bounds safer to use.
Don’t think about it as keeping the common man out, it is about keeping The Man out.
There is actually a JS library called Planktos that can serve static websites over BitTorrent. I don’t know how good it is, but it sounds like a starting point.
That would be very cool, I know we have onion sites that operate on the Tor network that use keypairs for the domains, but the sites themselves are still centrally hosted by a person, anonymously hosted but still centrally hosted.
Problem with IPFS, is that it’s not really that decentralized as I wish it was. Since by default the data is not shared across the network, meaning if nobody is downloading and hosting that node, you are still the only one having a copy of the data. Meaning if your connection is gone or if you get censored, there is no other node where the IPFS data is living. It only works if somebody else is activily downloading the data.
Ow, and then you also need to Pin the content, or the data will be removed again -,-
Furthermore, the look-up via DHT is very slow and resolving the data is way too slow in order to make sense. People expect today max 1 or 2 seconds look-up time + page load would result in 4 or 5 seconds… Max… However with IPFS this could be 20, 30 seconds or even minutes…
These IPFS issues are basically UI-related. You wouldn’t expect a torrent to start within 2 seconds. You wouldn’t expect your torrent to be shared autonomously either. Technically, sharing IPFS hashes along with release names (similar to the crc32 on pre databases) would be very efficient, if only it was popular with a proper UI and indexing tooling. These hashes could even be signed by scene groups in the nfo.
That’s just for files though. Imagine a specific decentralised protocol for hosting websites.
You can technically host a website on IPFS but it’s a nightmare and makes updating the website basically impossible 2021 wikipedia IPFS Mirror. A specific protocol would make it far more accessible.
Websites are just files. For something like running a site on ipfs, you’d want to pack everything into a few files, or just one, and serve that. Then you just open that file in the browser, and boom, site.
I’m not really sure it qualifies as a web site any more at that point, but an ipfs site for sure. Ipfs has links, right?
With LibreWeb I tried to go this route, using IPFS protocol. But like I mention above, IPFS is not as decentralized by design as people might think. People still need to download the content first and hosting a node… And then ALSO pin the content… It’s not great. And look-up takes way too long as well with their DHT look-up.
Well… it’s not really designed for that use case, so yeah you’ll have to deal with issues like that. For interplanetary file transfers, that’s acceptable.
Blockchain is a nice technology, but not all the solutions need blockchain technology. Just like BitTorrent doesn’t require blockchain, a decentralized internet alternative also doesn’t need blockchain.
Although if implemented as an extension to BitTorrent, I’d want it to be append-only, because I don’t want to lose 1.0 just because 1.1 becomes available.
I want that. For example you downloaded debian iso version 13 and after some time it can be updated to 13.1. Obviously it shouldn’t be an automatic operation unless you allowed it before starting download.
Like the 13.1 torrent being only a patch to the 13 one and listing it as a dependency? Downloading the 13.1 torrent would transparently download the 13 if it wasn’t already, then download the 13.1 patch and apply it. But I don’t think any of this needs to be at the protocole level, that’s client functionality.
I wouldn’t call that mutable, more like version tracking in which each torrent is aware of future versions.
I kind of like that, but you might be able to accomplish it with a plugin or something.
Put a file in the torrent called “versions” or something like that, and in there would be a url that the client can use to tell you if there is a new version.
It wouldn’t change the protocol though, since the new version and old version would still need to be separate entities with different data and different seeding.
Yep I’ve been using it almost 2 decades with basically no slowdown, I have netflix which is bad enough and refuse to pay for any other streaming service so anything not on there I torrent, in addition to games a few times a year would be more because most large developers are trash but I not much of a gamer
The extra time it takes to find a magnet launch my client and DL is worth the money saved, anything popular has enough seeders to DL quick and anything obscure enough not to have many seeders you probably wouldn’t find on a premium service at all, as is the feeling of getting one over on atrocious companies and the sense of smug superiority over those paying for 5+ services and still can’t watch everything they want
Torrenting is a decentralized approach and the corpo parasite hates it because there is nothing they can do about it, short of shutting down the internet lol
It is not anonymous and suffers network fragmentation. Yet the force of Bittorrent is its large community and mature performant tooling (compared to IPFS).
I2P is not universally supported by any bittorrent clients, because a bittorrent client needs specific knowledge about how to connect to the I2P network through an I2P router (by using the “SAM” protocol).
the java based biglybt bittortent client has pretty good support as I hear, it supports I2P-specific DHT and Peer Exchange. DHT is used for peer discovery without a tracker, Peer Exchange is another tech that helps with finding more peers.
qbittorrent (and a few others that use the libtorrent programming library) has got support for I2P around a year ago, but its experimental so far I think, or at least it hasn’t been tested that much.
these bt clients don’t (yet) support DHT and PeX for I2P torrents. the functionality is missing from libtorrent and its single dev is very busy already.
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What the what? More relevant than ever. How is this a legitimate question? I2p is great but adoption is extremely low.
It’s not.
When I want to pirate, torrenting is my go to. I don’t do it very often, so I’m not really up-to-date on more modern methods. For some movies, I know there are those websites like 123movies or whatever. And I’ve used those. But Idek what additional methods there are anymore.
That said, I’ve tried torrenting over I2P, but it’s just slow. Not necessarily super slow, but obviously slower than doing it over the clearweb with a commercial VPN. Additionally it seems like there’s less available content with torrenting over I2P. At least in the little experience I’ve had with it.
Eh, DDL links go dead all the time, torrents are alive even after years after a show last aired.
I always go to 🏴☠️ bay whenever I look for a tv show or movie.
🏴☠️ bay still exists? Really? Is it still legit or now a honeypot?
I don’t really care. You should be using a VPN for torrents anyways. I mostly pirate movies and TV shows so there nearly zero malware risk as long as the system and the VLC is up to date.
The official site is the🏴☠️bay[dot]org
🏴☠️ is a singular word, don’t add an “s” for no reason.
The article you linked answers most of your questions.
It has not been surpassed by another protocol. The relative numbers don’t say much about absolute numbers or usage.
And 10 % of global internet upload is certainly no irrelevancy.
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Yeah but nobody uses v2. It’s a neat idea but private trackers don’t like it and uploaders who want internet credit don’t like it either.
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A better question is, what would you improve over current way that torrents work.
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I wish there were some way to enable availability to persist even when torrents’ peak of popularity has passed - some kind of decentralized, self-healing archive where a torrent’s minimal presence on the network was maintained. Old torrents then could become slow but the archival system would prevent them being lost completely, while distributing storage efficiently. Maybe this isn’t practical in terms of storage, but the tendency of bittorrent to lose older content can be frustrating.
I don’t see what you can do at the protocol level to improve availability, you still need people storing the file and acting as peers. Some trackers try to improve that by incentivizing long term seeding.
It’s called private trackers, and they are great.
Meh… I get itchy when I hear private. We could also improve the experience for seeding publicly and for longer. Not only by education but maybe even using some kind of intensive to keep seeding.
The issue is that public trackers are too easy for people to monitor and pursue copyright infringement claims for. Private trackers, by design, are much harder to do that with, which makes them leaps and bounds safer to use.
Don’t think about it as keeping the common man out, it is about keeping The Man out.
A better question is; What would you change in the current Internet/WWW to make it as decentralized as Torrents are?
I wish there was a decentralised way of hosting websites. Kind of like torrents.
I’m personally trying to fix it… https://libreweb.org. Still a proof of concept though.
Looks really cool. Thanks for the share
Why MIT license and not something like GPLv3?
MIT license is more permissive.
Yeah but then companies can use your work and not provide compensation. But to each their own.
Yes that is true.
There is actually a JS library called Planktos that can serve static websites over BitTorrent. I don’t know how good it is, but it sounds like a starting point.
https://github.com/xuset/planktos
That would be very cool, I know we have onion sites that operate on the Tor network that use keypairs for the domains, but the sites themselves are still centrally hosted by a person, anonymously hosted but still centrally hosted.
Sounds like maybe what you’re looking for is ipfs? https://ipfs.tech/
Problem with IPFS, is that it’s not really that decentralized as I wish it was. Since by default the data is not shared across the network, meaning if nobody is downloading and hosting that node, you are still the only one having a copy of the data. Meaning if your connection is gone or if you get censored, there is no other node where the IPFS data is living. It only works if somebody else is activily downloading the data.
Ow, and then you also need to Pin the content, or the data will be removed again -,-
Furthermore, the look-up via DHT is very slow and resolving the data is way too slow in order to make sense. People expect today max 1 or 2 seconds look-up time + page load would result in 4 or 5 seconds… Max… However with IPFS this could be 20, 30 seconds or even minutes…
These IPFS issues are basically UI-related. You wouldn’t expect a torrent to start within 2 seconds. You wouldn’t expect your torrent to be shared autonomously either. Technically, sharing IPFS hashes along with release names (similar to the crc32 on pre databases) would be very efficient, if only it was popular with a proper UI and indexing tooling. These hashes could even be signed by scene groups in the nfo.
That’s just for files though. Imagine a specific decentralised protocol for hosting websites.
You can technically host a website on IPFS but it’s a nightmare and makes updating the website basically impossible 2021 wikipedia IPFS Mirror. A specific protocol would make it far more accessible.
Websites are just files. For something like running a site on ipfs, you’d want to pack everything into a few files, or just one, and serve that. Then you just open that file in the browser, and boom, site.
I’m not really sure it qualifies as a web site any more at that point, but an ipfs site for sure. Ipfs has links, right?
With LibreWeb I tried to go this route, using IPFS protocol. But like I mention above, IPFS is not as decentralized by design as people might think. People still need to download the content first and hosting a node… And then ALSO pin the content… It’s not great. And look-up takes way too long as well with their DHT look-up.
Well… it’s not really designed for that use case, so yeah you’ll have to deal with issues like that. For interplanetary file transfers, that’s acceptable.
There’s some cryptobro projects about sticking distributed file sharing on top of ~ THE BLOCKCHAIN ~.
I’m skeptical, but it might actually be a valid use of such a thing.
Blockchain is a nice technology, but not all the solutions need blockchain technology. Just like BitTorrent doesn’t require blockchain, a decentralized internet alternative also doesn’t need blockchain.
The profit motive
Make mutable torrents possible.
Resilio sync can do this, I’m pretty sure.
Although if implemented as an extension to BitTorrent, I’d want it to be append-only, because I don’t want to lose 1.0 just because 1.1 becomes available.
What’s the advantage to that? I don’t want the torrent I’m downloading to change.
I want that. For example you downloaded debian iso version 13 and after some time it can be updated to 13.1. Obviously it shouldn’t be an automatic operation unless you allowed it before starting download.
Like the 13.1 torrent being only a patch to the 13 one and listing it as a dependency? Downloading the 13.1 torrent would transparently download the 13 if it wasn’t already, then download the 13.1 patch and apply it. But I don’t think any of this needs to be at the protocole level, that’s client functionality.
I wouldn’t call that mutable, more like version tracking in which each torrent is aware of future versions.
I kind of like that, but you might be able to accomplish it with a plugin or something.
Put a file in the torrent called “versions” or something like that, and in there would be a url that the client can use to tell you if there is a new version.
It wouldn’t change the protocol though, since the new version and old version would still need to be separate entities with different data and different seeding.
“Is email still relevant in the modern era?”
I never used torrent as much as the last years
It’s alive and well. My independent research shows that torrents of users are using it for large foss packages, as well as various media.
This duck in a hoodie shows how both technologies can function together. https://hackyourmom.com/en/pryvatnist/bittorrent-cherez-i2p-dlya-anonimnogo-obminu-fajlamy/
Yep I’ve been using it almost 2 decades with basically no slowdown, I have netflix which is bad enough and refuse to pay for any other streaming service so anything not on there I torrent, in addition to games a few times a year would be more because most large developers are trash but I not much of a gamer
The extra time it takes to find a magnet launch my client and DL is worth the money saved, anything popular has enough seeders to DL quick and anything obscure enough not to have many seeders you probably wouldn’t find on a premium service at all, as is the feeling of getting one over on atrocious companies and the sense of smug superiority over those paying for 5+ services and still can’t watch everything they want
It ain’t going anywhere
Torrenting is a decentralized approach and the corpo parasite hates it because there is nothing they can do about it, short of shutting down the internet lol
Get fuck Disney
I2p is not a more efficient file sharing protocol.
You may be thinking about ipfs, which is a file sharing protocol, but I wouldn’t say that is more efficient than bittorrent afaik.
It is not anonymous and suffers network fragmentation. Yet the force of Bittorrent is its large community and mature performant tooling (compared to IPFS).
I2P is not an alternative to bittorrent, but to IP networks. Essentially I2P is an overlay over the IP-based Internet.
bittorrent can work through I2P just like it can over IP or Tor.
Thank you for this clarification
wow, this has blown up!
some additional clarification:
I2P is not universally supported by any bittorrent clients, because a bittorrent client needs specific knowledge about how to connect to the I2P network through an I2P router (by using the “SAM” protocol).
the java based biglybt bittortent client has pretty good support as I hear, it supports I2P-specific DHT and Peer Exchange. DHT is used for peer discovery without a tracker, Peer Exchange is another tech that helps with finding more peers.
qbittorrent (and a few others that use the libtorrent programming library) has got support for I2P around a year ago, but its experimental so far I think, or at least it hasn’t been tested that much.
these bt clients don’t (yet) support DHT and PeX for I2P torrents. the functionality is missing from libtorrent and its single dev is very busy already.
if you are interested about the technical aspects, here are some more words about using bittorrent with I2P from a developer perspective: https://geti2p.net/en/docs/applications/bittorrent
Just taught my ten year old how to.use bit torrent last week. It will live forever!