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Comment by xibalba | Hacker News Reader

To me, BitTorrent feels a lot like Blockchain: interesting tech that doesn't seem to be able to find a practical and useful application (proportionate to the attendant hype). Which is not to say that either can't, they just haven't yet. Why?

EDIT: while I don't (yet) consider myself delirious, responses to this comment have illuminated how little I know about the influence and application of BitTorrent. In other words, I retract the above opinion.

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You're delirious.

Setting aside the fact that BitTorrent came about long before BitCoin was a glint in Satoshi's eye, it's still massively used for content distribution, on top of being a foundational technology to several industrial applications: Apache Spark, for example, uses BitTorrent to shuffle/broadcast data around cluster nodes.

Even when BitTorrent alternatives are used in its place (such as IPFS, Dat, or Kademlia), BT was still a massive influence in all of their designs, and to the design of any other DHT that came about after its release.

All of these, plus other systems that are (in abstract) similar constructions, have several industrial applications for asset distribution (Netflix uses IPFS to distribute container images internally [0], Uber and Alibaba do similar things) and network management (DNS for example, is really just a DHT, as are several other network protocols)

Ever since BitTorrent came about, it has unequivocally been a resounding success. It never for a moment had to look for applications, there were already plenty since day one.

[0] https://blog.ipfs.io/2020-02-14-improved-bitswap-for-contain...

Wasn’t the original Skype that Microsoft paid billions for also based on BitTorrent technology?

Not BitTorrent exactly, but close enough that if the blockchain spinoff was bought for that much the blockchain folks would certainly consider (rightfully IMO) a victory in the blockchain column.

Skype was based on JoltID/Kazaa.

> it's still massively used for content distribution

Is it, though? Youtube doesn't use it, neither do Netflix, Hulu, Amazon Prime Video, Disney+, Spotify, etc. Does anybody (except for Blizzard) use it? I don't think Steam or the Epic store or the App Store or the Play Store use it, either.

I'd be extremely glad to be proven wrong.

I believe Steam uses it. The network graphs they spout show behaviours consistent with BT-like activity.

I'm pretty sure the BBC iPlayer used it too, at some point (no idea if it's still the case).

Most Linux projects use it.

Any company offering a "download manager" for 1GB+ files, is likely to be implementing something similar to BT behind the scenes.

The thing is: if bandwidth costs are a real problem for you, BT is a killer solution to offload some of those costs. If they are little more than a footnote (like for the mega-services you list), then BT is unnecessary and it will probably slow down overall performance too.

v1 of iPlayer used bittorrent, but these days it's all streaming.

Windows has some sort of P2P update distribution system, although (1) I don't know that it is bittorrent and (2) it seems to be massively slower than just using MSFT's servers directly, so I'd suggest disabling it. On the order of 100x slower.

I've never managed to see it working on personal PCs. Unfortunate.

Still waiting for the day such a feature arrives on Linux, it'd be an instant hit everywhere where uplink is slow and expensive, especially in developing countries.

Wasn't there an `apt-transport-torrent`package a while back? It shouldn't be that hard to get going, just include a magnet link in the metadata for the package.

I remember reading about how Facebook uses it to distribute updates amongst servers.

You mean beside being responsible for ~50% of the global internet traffic in 2009? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BitTorrent

Yeah, but what's the current number? I'd be surprised if it were more than 5-10% these days. 2009 was 11 years ago, the internet was a much smaller and less regulated place.

Even if it were only 5-10% of internet traffic, that’d be huge! Think about how much the internet has exploded in use since 2009.

Youtube is 37% of all mobile traffic. [1]

[1]- https://www.statista.com/chart/17321/global-downstream-mobil...

that is still way WAY more than enough to justify it's utility.

You think that if something once took up 50% of all traffic on the internet it never found a practical application?

> proportionate to the attendant hype

From the original comment.

Also, just because it was 50% at some point, it doesn't really matter today. Paraphrasing, a technology is only as good as it's latest match result.

Perl was once powering the web, nowadays you have to look at the web with an electronic microscope to find it...

This is silly. Are you actually saying that bittorrent was hyped so much that constituting half the internet was a letdown? And that Perl didn't live up to its hype because it's only common today, and not as universal as it once was?

> This is silly. Are you actually saying that bittorrent was hyped so much that constituting half the internet was a letdown?

My point is that it was a fad, it's barely used anymore and it was 50% in 2009, now its usage is much, much lower. I've seen a lot of statistics of streaming services being 20-30% of the internet each (Netflix, Youtube), so I'd be amazed if BitTorrent is more than 10% 2020 (and that's a very generous estimate), as I said previously. Anyway, it doesn't matter, there are a lot of techs that were super hyped and in the end, faded away. SOAP, CORBA, XML databases, semantic web techs (RDF, etc.), RSS, ...

> And that Perl didn't live up to its hype because it's only common today, and not as universal as it once was?

Perl is not common, it's uncommon. Let's say you're a developer in one of 100 big cities around the world, how likely it is for you to find a job developing Perl web apps? I'd say that in 80-90 of those, you can't even find that job. That's not a common tech in 2020 ;-)

Pogs were a fad. Bittorrent took downloading large files from being an unreliable pain to being effortless.

Perl was not a 'fad', it was what powered the internet's dynamic sites in the early days. Foundational technologies that eventually are hidden from the average person is not what 'fad' refers to.

Just because you don't use something doesn't mean it isn't used. You keep digging in to nonsense. (Also total internet bandwidth usage has increased significantly over time).

I use BT much more than 5 years ago since most popular content was removed from Netflix. Many folks here have said the same.

That makes zero sense. How much of the entire internet should have been bittorrent to live up to the "hype". Also what hype are you talking about? I only remember bittorrent gaining traction because it worked. Where is your idea of hype coming from?

Insofar as the majority of that traffic is likely illegal (in terms of sharing pirated property) I would not consider it useful.

It's not legal, therefore it's not practical? That doesn't make any sense at all.

useful != legal

This falls apart when you examine prohibited goods. Guns are illegal in most countries because they are very useful.

Are they though? I'm 38 and can't remember a situation in my life where a gun would have been useful. Not saying that I can't imagine such situations, I just find it a slightly weird example to make this point.

I also don't think that a fishing pole is useful, but that's because I don't like to fish. With a gun I could

* defend myself

* rob you

* murder you very effectively

* enjoy target shooting

* hunt wild game

* provide peace of mind in troubled times when law and order break down

The fewer guns there are per capita, the more useful they become for criminals. They are so useful, in fact, that people will spend a lot of money and subject themselves to costly and invasive regulations just to buy one gun. If no one found them useful, no one would find it necessary to ban them.

> I would not consider it useful.

Perhaps you meant (and people should have charitably interpreted you as meaning) "I would consider it to have no legitimate uses" or "... no uses worth supporting".

Why...?

BitTorrent has been influential in lots of applications. If you really need proof that BitTorrent can move milestones, it help perpetuate sites like thepiratebay.org and assisted in the advent of modern day streaming services that both the music and movie industry neglected for years. It is also a central influence for p2p networking and file sharing.

Yeah, but it's not used anymore, from what I know. Few places use it for distribution, I guess they don't consider it worth the hassle. Blizzard was using it to distribute binaries.

I guess mobile internet was its downfall as few people want to seed from a mobile connection.

There are vast data archives exposed through private trackers that work on top of bittorrent. This isn't widely known due to their private, invite-only (and in some cases, entirely closed) nature but the fact remains that these exist and are fundamental in multiple, widely divergent communities.

Can you give some examples? It all sounds very... mysterious. At least, what kind of content are we talking about?

A public example is rutracker.org. Another is sci-hub. See Joe Karaganis for some cannonical info: http://piracy.americanassembly.org/shadow-libraries/

There's also The Internet Archive that provides torrents that's in the clearnet.

Music, movies, tv, video games, books. Some trackers specialize in one type of content, some have everything.

Finding URLs of private trackers is trivial in google. Getting an invite usually requires knowing another user, unless they temporarily open signups for everyone.

Here's one of many lists of private trackers

https://hdvinnie.github.io/Private-Trackers-Spreadsheet/

>I guess mobile internet was its downfall as few people want to seed from a mobile connection.

CGNAT has a lot to answer for, too

Lots of companies use BT in a datacenter environment to efficiently distribute binaries to a large number of hosts.

Again, this is in the context of the original BitTorrent hype. Which was huge. What you're mentioning is small potatoes.

Again it’s not small potatoes if the protocol is widely used. There is no strict definition of what kind of data can be used with BitTorrent. And because you only know of a few public examples doesn’t make the protocol unused, abandoned, or any less significant.

Well, both threaten the establishment. Blockchain would basically upend states, with unclear benefits. BitTorrent would allow for very efficient distribution of a lot of data, which can conflict with copyright.

At least BitTorrent is environment friendly :-)

I estimate that thousands of people use torrent every day since 20 years. I use it very often. maybe it's just that nobody uses it in your close network

I estimate that a lot of people won't even know if they're using it. Especially if we take things like PopCorn Time into account.

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