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?
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…
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)
What are you even rambling about? Torrent has been essential.
IPFS, as well as many other P2P sharing technologies, on the other hand…
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.
However the reason why those non-tech savvy have access to pirated content for free, with fast download speeds and with unlimited downloading is because of torrents. Bittorrent is what makes that possible.
yes it does. Never disputed that. Doesn’t change the fact that the average user does not care in the slightest about how it works, not that it does work.
Cries in tenfingers
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’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)
He worked at Valve for like 6 months
The local steam update distribution system probably uses bittorrent or something very similar.
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.
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.
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.
You still need to seed and once the thing has been distributed, odds are good the clients will disconnect among the normies. Bittorrent only really works if everyone contributes space and bandwidth because you’re really joining a community and curating data. And not everyone is nerdy or tech savvy enough to do that which means products aren’t really going to be built around it.
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.
The costs of distribution aren’t so expensive for anything but the largest amounts of data (video)
You can grab a digital ocean server droplet for $6 per month that allows a Terabyte of transfer. That’s 0.6 cents per GB, and includes the compute to actually be able to serve that data as well as the transfer amount.
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?
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 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.
I think it, or derrivative methods are used more than you think, but aren’t talked about because torrenting has a bad rep.
I believe windows update and World of Warcraft either do or did use p2p downloads for updates
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…It’s essential for me! how else will I get.my movies, shows and software?
