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Comment by barrystaes | Hacker News Reader

Its not really decentralized. Readme says:

" magnetico liberates BitTorrent from the yoke of centralised trackers & web-sites and makes it truly decentralised. Finally! "

Source says: ( https://github.com/boramalper/magnetico/blob/42b2d64d200e2af... )

    BOOTSTRAPPING_NODES = [
        ("router.bittorrent.com", 6881),
        ("dht.transmissionbt.com", 6881)
    ]

Also, i think its going to be very difficult to find anything in the DHT (spam) chaos without some of the pre-filtering that exists by using torrent sites. Fun project though..

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>Its not really decentralized

Every DHT has to be bootstrapped from something. If that makes it not distributed then i'm not sure anything is. You can use whatever bootstrap nodes you want by changing the values.

Readme says "truly decentralised" which is the point, not "not distributed". It certainly is distributed, just not truly. It requires bootstrapping with prefixed domain names. Bootstrapping is not bad (when done securely), but the false claim is.

Please explain how you would do truly decentralized bootstrapping?

Well, it is decentralised but not truly/completely distributed.[0] I guess a distributed system would allow clients to search the network right from the querying machine instead of a server.

The adjective truly meant that you can actually start using it right away. Starting a traditional torrent website/tracker is not hard and there must be open source implementations as well, but the problem is (as in all social systems), they suffer from the trap of initialisation: there is no content because you have no users, and there are no users because you don't have anything to offer them, and so on. magnetico discovers the torrents so it's a truly decentralised solution that you can actually start using right away.

[0]: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Centralised-decentra...

DHT bootstrapping is an implementation detail, not part of the protocol. You don't need DNS or any dedicated bootstrapping mechanism since any node in the network can be used to join it. You could call your friend and ask for the IP and port of his bittorrent client.

So the protocol is fully decentralized. Implementations tend to use bootstrapping mechanisms that rely on an expandable, customizable list of known bootstrap nodes, but this is not essential.

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