Comment by luizfelberti | Hacker News Reader

Comment by luizfelberti | Hacker News Reader

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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...

> 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.

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.

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