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Comment by Iv | Hacker News Reader

Because as techies we fail to recognize that some things are the way they are not for lack of a better alternative, but because of entrenched interests.

I am still amazed that the record industry managed to shut down what was likely to be the next iteration of internet: P2P exchanges. Now we have a centralized youtube solving in a bad way what eDonkey+VLC could have solved for two decades already.

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> P2P exchanges. Now we have a centralized youtube solving in a bad way what eDonkey+VLC could have solved for two decades already.

Hey, that can still happen..

Here in China, where privacy is rampant, P2P dies because of lack of public IPs.

Was that an accident, or was it on purpose because centralized systems are easier to monitor/censor?

China does not have many public IPs (v4) in the first place, so I doubt it is in any way deliberate. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_IPv4_addr...:

Country | Number of IPv4 addresses Per Person

US | 4.91196

China | 0.24591

And IP addresses per internet-connected person?

Searching for 'China internet percentage' shows several sites claiming ~50%, so double the ratio to ~0.5, or 10 times less than the USA.

I don't know the numbers, but even if it exceeded one, it wouldn't mean every Chinese would get one public IP. Many IP addresses are still on sale.

Isn't IPv6 widely deployed in china? Most major bittorrent clients have partial or complete IPv6 support these days - although IPv6 DHT support is still lacking apart from Transmission and BiglyBT.

But I don't know about the state of things of the multi-network clients which are popular china.

> Isn't IPv6 widely deployed in china?

No, IPv6 is currently available in only few places, such as universities. Where it is available, torrenting is indeed prevalent, and the speed is good (typically saturating our 100Mbps ethernet link).

Recently there has been a renewed push from the Chinese government to widen the deployment of IPv6, but the effect remains to be seen.

What do you mean by shutdown? I'm using torrents almost every day.

But you are not using P2P to exchange pictures or video with your friend or family. You store them in a big central server that somehow magically get paid for.

Wikipedia still begs yearly for hosting whereas if people voluntered their bandwidth and space there would be no problem hosting it.

I remember eDonkey fondly. The variety of things you can get with torrents pale in comparison of what was open to us: people would just share "their" files with a huge variety of different content. Nowadays you only get a few thousands of the most popular US movies.

Cost of maintaining my pictures and videos is tiny, as is cost of maintaining Wikipedia (relative to its users). Simple VPS for $1/month is enough for me, and with economies of scale, I'm sure that it's few cents per user at most. Wikipedia has no problem getting enough donation to continue its work.

I like the idea of P2P social network, but honestly I think that there's no problem to solve in the first place. While distribution of huge video files and music files is a problem and torrents solve it, that's why they are popular. It's not easy to host terabytes of video with thousands of downloads. But it's trivially solved with torrents.

Hosting costs are not the main reason for the yearly fundraisers on Wikipedia. From July 2016 to June 2017 the Wikimedia Foundation raised $87.5 million in donations and spent $2.2 million in hosting.

https://annual.wikimedia.org/2017/financials.html

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