When bittorrent was released, I saw the technological aspects as groundbreaking, thinking it would be repurposed for much more than ISO downloads and mass media distribution. How did the technology not become a more popular way of distributing via crowdsourcing large community datasets, such as openstreetmaps, or something like distribution of Android rom updates, when the costs of distribution are so expensive?
I guess it’s because of IPv4, now majority of the people are likely behind carrier grade NAT making seeding impractical to do unless you have a purpose built machine with a public IP. This likely reduce adoption, doesn’t help that it’s usually associated with piracy so there is probably an incentive to stop or slow the use by the ISPs.
Probably because bittorrent didn’t have any way to rank users based on how much they seeded, and also the fact that it wasn’t configured properly out of the box with basically every program that I have viewed. By default, bit torrent destroys the CPU in your router with as many as 500 active connections.
Another reason is that so much software is commercial, and these companies want to maintain control over the servers for tax reasons but also so they can end the products life very early and try to force users to buy new versions. Not every video game does this but many of the more corporate and publicly traded ones do this.
It’s essential for me! how else will I get.my movies, shows and software?
It is widely used.
However it also has downsides on a technological level: by design it’s a lot of connections which can be an issue so it doesn’t work everywhere, especially playing well with other communications.
I remember downloading metal gear online updates over p2p and thinking “world is changing”. That was the last popular service I saw to use that technology over central server direct download.
Its used in a lot of places. I’d say its about as essential as FTP, maybe a bit less. Take of that as you will.
I’m thinking of other problems BT could help solve, but I can’t think of any. Maybe decentralized syncing of data across a global CDN network?
Would be great if we could utilize it for video sharing since bandwidth is always a problem there, but its not really designed for it. Though I think there’s a lot of things we could solve with p2p, bittorrent may not be the correct protocol to use. A decentralized p2p marketplace was mentioned a few years back, but I can’t recall any detail or even name now…What are you even rambling about? Torrent has been essential.
IPFS, as well as many other P2P sharing technologies, on the other hand…
Cries in tenfingers
that’s because the tech people think p2p is what made bittorrent popular. It didn’t. Free stuff being available on it is what did.
P2P being what made it popular is still the truth. It democratises media distribution as you do not have to pay for expensive hosting or cloud storage, meaning you can download pirate files without having to pay Turbobit, Rapidgator or other service for a speed faster than a few hundred kb/s.
only among tech people. Way to prove my point. The general population only cared about easy access to free movies, they did not, and still do not care about the underlying implementation that makes that possible. My dad downloads stuff occasionally, I assure you, he does not know what bittorrent does
I was a prolific user of BitTorrent early, and I knew very few people who used it, let alone understood the basics of it. Now it seems like arcane knowledge, young folks have no idea. This is just my IRL experience though.
At some point bit torrent WAS an essential distribution tool. It represented nearly 70% of internet traffic!
So I think you’re asking the wrong question…
Before Youtube allowed long video uploads and before video Podcasts were a thing, I remember some early tech creators were creating long form videos around 2004-2005 and they would distribute episodes via BitTorrent, since it was most cost effective for them.
Still works well as a concept for PeerTube…
yes the DHT and tree-hashing distribution system will be the essential backbone of many other fully distributed P2P projects hopefully
A lot of stuff uses bittorrent for file transfers behind the scenes these days.
What does Steam use? Gotta be a torrent for games and dlc.
Steam allows P2P transfers if the machines are on the same LAN. Like if your desktop has a game installed, and you start to install it on your Steam Deck, it will ask if you want to download it directly from your PC.
Yeah that’s really cool. I discovered that with one of my games.
I know it can do something similar if another machine on your network has the same games installed, but I don’t know if they use bittorrent for the main system or even that network sharing dealie.
It’s something i wonder about sometimes, but never care enough to look up.
I know blizz used it with battlenet years ago
I mean it still has a purpose? Don’t know where you’re going with this, do you have some grudge against BitTorrent we don’t know about?
For nerdy nerds like us a torrent client isn’t anything complicated. Regulating up and downstream bandwidth to personal preference isn’t complicated. Managing torrents to seed and not isn’t complicated. For your Average Joe though…
Plus, Average Joe doesn’t have port forwarding set up to punch a P2P hole thru his IPv4 NAT router
But his ISP router will have UPNP enabled which does it for him.
(shudder)
Pretty sure its being used in the backend by lots of huge things. I remember something about meta/facebook using it for server side stuff. I reckon many companies that have to distribute big updates use it as well like game companies. Its just not being used to liberate users but used to lighten the load on commercial infrastructure.
Valve hired the creator of Bittorrent to write Steam.
He worked at Valve for like 6 months
He’s a fascinating guy that has worked on a bunch of projects I wish I was smart and productive enough to have worked on
He also firmly denies that bittorrent can even hypothetically be used for piracy (though in his position, you probably have to)
The local steam update distribution system probably uses bittorrent or something very similar.
The costs of distribution aren’t really that expensive for big companies.
You can’t really trust that users are going to be willing to donate hard drive space and upload bandwidth to help your maps service or whatever work. (Though, to be fair, you did mention things like OpenStreetMap which is probably more likely for users to be willing to support that way.)
Bittorrent isn’t something you can seamlessly integrate into browser-based apps.
But also, there are newer technologes based on a very Bittorrent-like P2P way of doing things. IPFS is basically reskinned Bittorrent. And Peertube uses in-browser P2P to distribute videos. I don’t think there’s any standard in, say, HTML5 that allows for P2P without some hacks, but it sounds like there’s a good chance such a standard is likely to make its way into browsers in the relatively near future. Also, it sounds like Chrome supports more than Firefox in that area right now.
Bittorrent isn’t something you can seamlessly integrate into browser-based apps.
That’s only because we don’t have the file compression technology yet.
We do have webtorrent.io at least
Is that middle out compression?
I’m not sure of the implementation details to be honest.
Hey just a heads up, you added an extra “to become” in your title. Anyway great question, I’ve always wondered this, hopefully someone knows better.
Perhaps the growth of everyone placing files on clouds these days may be contribute to its inpopularity, or simply because the name just got lumped together with copyright infringement.
Hey just a heads up, inpopularity starts with a ‘u’.
Thanks and yes I’m comfortable with English as my first language. I was trying to post my comment with respect for OP. A QWERTY keyboard has the U and I together, my phone keyboard sucks for sure.
Totally off topic, but I read a classic author’s murder mystery as a kid, Doyle or Agatha or whoever, and a clue was a mistyped B for N, because they’re together on the keyboard. For 40 years I’ve been noting such errors. “Ah! OP meant to type ‘U’.” :)
Yeah, it didn’t help that politicians tried to make p2p protocols illegal because they didn’t want or didn’t care to understand the difference.
I think that the idea of an app “stealing” bandwidth from its users because they want to save money on their own servers is a pretty bad look. Our current world is still not that great w/r/t internet quality, price, and availability, and it was surely worse in the past. It could definitely be more of a thing in the future, but maybe only for stuff used by techy people who could understand it and give proper consent.
I mean, the core idea of the technology - that a single monolithic file can be broken up into a torrent of smaller packets and losing the connection won’t mean that you lose your progress towards downloading the big file - doesn’t require that you also act as a seeder. Personally, I’m fairly sure Steam uses something like this behind the scenes, as their delivery system, because you can interrupt it and it will continue once you resume.
because you can interrupt it and it will continue once you resume.
I’m not debating whether Steam is doing p2p or not, but HTTP absolutely supports continuing partial download.
Are you implying that BitTorrent can only be used secretly by apps?
I’m implying that most normal people would not give their consent to it, or would be coerced by the app into giving consent when they don’t understand what it means (e.g. Windows Delivery Optimization).
