I'm continually surprised that Bittorrent is still relying on content indexing websites. The edonkey community solved this problem years ago with fully distributed search that only relies on the peers themselves[0].
Can anyone with insight into the BT comunity/technology offer any ideas why they never moved in this direction?
Its because bit torrent trackers are much more than just an index of torrents. They need a huge support system with forums, membership systems, point systems, funding drives, etc. If you look at the software that runs these sites you will see that moving to a distributed platform would not be so easy.
> none of that is relevant if you're not using index sites in the first place
One of the reasons that bittorrent has been successful and all the other protocols have failed is precisely because it allows for the use of private index sites.
This allows for the creation of custom software that can provide all those extras (forums, comments, ratings, descriptions, etc.), but most importantly, user tracking.
If you track the user, you can solve the sharing problem. For someone to download, someone else has to upload. Using index sites allows you to solve the hit-and-run problem, where someone just downloads, but then doesn't upload. You just ban those people. You then end up with a community where everyone plays nice, which leads to fast speeds and an eagerness to share content.
The "hit-and-run" problem turns out not to be that big of an issue really - there's so many public torrents out there and so many people that want the files that things mostly seem to work out just fine.
Sure, you won't max gigabit like you will on some private stuff, but unless that's an absolute need, issues with public trackers are fairly rare. In fact I've occasionally found files with only a single peer or two on a private tracker which would barely download which were much more readily available on a public tracker.
> Sure, you won't max gigabit like you will on some private stuff, but unless that's an absolute need, issues with public trackers are fairly rare.
Well, that's kind of the point. If you can download something that's 3GB in two minutes, it fundamentally changes how you deal with media.
There's also the issue of security that I didn't mention. Public torrents are visible to everyone, so your download or upload is an action viewable to everyone. With private trackers, your actions are only viewable to the members.
> Well, that's kind of the point. If you can download something that's 3GB in two minutes, it fundamentally changes how you deal with media.
Not really in my experience. I'm a big usenet guy, but I still horde a local collection - if you're using a private tracker you don't want to be re-downloading things all the time because that'd cost you ratio and you still need to hold them long enough to upload them a fair bit. Usenet is really the closest you get to not needing to hoard, but there's still a risk with that, so you often keep it around.
I wouldn't say having something in 2 minutes vs an hour, but still needing to keep it around "fundamentally changes how you deal with media". Especially when you can freely stream a torrent using peerflix off a public tracker, but can't off a private one due to ratio concerns.
Distributed indexing is very hard, slow and easily gamed. If you remember Kazaa, for example, it had an enormous problem with low quality content and malware.
The best solution is not fully distributed indexing, rather decentralized indexing, such as IPFS.
Check out Tribler, they have the torrent search thing working in a similar way to Kad from eDonkey land.
Their anonymous communication is pretty sketchy security wise, I wouldn't rely on it, but their DHT search is pretty good and their client has some cool features like streaming video too.
The other route I've seen people go is that of ZeroNet where you can have a central authority or a service-based approach like traditional torrent sites, but P2P-based distribution of the site.
Overall, Bittorent sort of has moved in this direction, they've added support for trackerless peering, 3rd parties have created search tools, but I think many people still rely on the websites because they offer additional functionality like malware removal and commenting and popularity in general.
You can see the huge benefit of this pretty easily if you compare bittorrent to other things. Almost every time I download a game or app from usenet, it's got some script kiddie's trojan bound to it. Even from the private ones. On the other hand, with the big public bittorrent indexes that is extremely rare because they tend to get flagged pretty fast due to sheer popularity more than anything else. Only the ZeroNet approach would offer a way to solve this that would be comparable to existing torrent sites today.
Can anyone with insight into the BT comunity/technology offer any ideas why they never moved in this direction?
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kademlia
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