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Comment by marcinjachymiak | Hacker News Reader

This is a really myopic view on uses of crypto and the BitTorrent protocol. There's so much more going on than criminal applications.

BitTorrent is used in a lot of settings for data distribution and for software distribution. Saying it's just for pirating reveals the author's laziness. Several of these use-cases are listed in the wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BitTorrent

As for crypto, I recommend people read about Bitcoin being used for the purposes of sending remittances to start.

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Also the author laments that bittorrent is not used for 1:1 transfers. Bittorrent's strength is in distributing bandwidth for popular files. Direct file transfers between people who know each other isn't really its target. So i feel that's a pretty unfair criticism.

You don't always need to take over the world to be succesful. Its fine to have a niche and just do that really well.

I think Bittorrent could be made usable for 1:1 transfers. The building blocks are there. But you'd have to streamline the process and build a client optimized for that case instead of the more common usage. The main missing piece would be a standardized encryption format. That doesn't really need protocol changes, just a storage-level convention how the data is encrypted before turning it into a torrent.

Agreed, but I don't think there's a lot of motivation to do so. At that point, BitTorrent is just DCC in a new fur coat. As stated earlier, BT is most appropriately used in a setting where you want to download a single file from multiple sources, distributing the workload between them and your network. This results in faster downloads, and does so in a way that is decentralized (for the most part) and scalable by design.

So while it could be done, the question is really "should it be done"? I'd love to be able to send a file over the internet easily without using some centralized service, but if there's only 2 people that are meant to have the file, does the overhead of BitTorrent make any sense?

We already have SFTP for this.

sftp doesn't do nat hole punching, does it?

Isn't this basically Resilio's Sync ? I've been using it for years on smartphone backups that otherwise wouldn't be able to hold a sustained transfer.

Yes, me too. It also have 1:1 functions for sending a file easily or sync a folder between all your oomputers and phones.

What do you mean, could be? https://instant.io/ is just one of many webtorrent sites that do this. It's a wonderful use of bittorrent.

Webtorrent is not fully decentralized since webrtc needs signalling servers for each session (you can't even store credentials in a cache and reuse them later) and it doesn't have a DHT since UDP isn't available in browsers.

It's not the same as bittorrent proper.

I'm not sure I see the point though?

For 1-to-1 transfers, Magic Wormhole is the system to beat, and I struggle to imagine how it could be improved.

https://github.com/magic-wormhole/magic-wormhole

I really wish magic wormhole worked conveniently on windows without obliging me to install python and pip and such. It's my go-to when sftp isn't an option, but for sftp not to be an option almost always means that one of the computers I'm trying to transfer between is a windows box.

That's reasonable, it's a great candidate for a rewrite in Go.

It's already a thing:

https://github.com/psanford/wormhole-william

Wormhole requirement: "the URL of a publicly-available Rendezvous Server"

This means its not a self-sovereign system, like Bittorrent, GIT, and Bitcoin. Its no different then a central Napster server, the one that got dragged into court on November 1999. Scientists are still working on creating self-sovereign peer-to-peer systems. Its hard, but we're going to solve it in coming years.

Scientific community: "International Workshop series on Distributed Infrastructure for Common Good", https://dicg2020.github.io/ (disclaimer: involved scientist)

Magic Wormhole has a good implementation in Go. It has windows binary.

https://github.com/psanford/wormhole-william

Windows binary: https://github.com/psanford/wormhole-william/releases/downlo...

There's GUI: https://github.com/Jacalz/wormhole-gui

Android app too: https://github.com/psanford/wormhole-william-mobile

The author is on HN as psanford

oh fantastic! thanks

First time I hear about Magic Whatever™. Any modern download tool needs to be embedded into browsers and mobile OSes for it to have any chance these days.

I haven't seen any regular user use a separate download tool or a download manager for a decade or more.

Except for BitTorrent clients, but those aren't targeted at 1:1, of course :-)

> As for crypto, I recommend people read about Bitcoin being used for the purposes of sending remittances to start.

I followed your recommendation and this is what I found: bitcoin might, in theory, work for the purpose of sending remittances, but in practice it doesn't.

So, returning to the original question, can cryptocurrencies offer an innovative solution for migrant remittances to developing countries? Yes and no. In theory, cryptocurrencies can really provide an effective and economical channel for money transfers to help alleviate poverty through remittances. However, there are two principle problems. Firstly, coins such as Bitcoin remain too volatile, in fact ten times more volatile than major currencies (Baur & Dimpfl 2021). This means that if migrants were to use such channel they would be exposing themselves to extreme risks. But, more importantly users of bitcoin may find themselves victims of speculative attacks, as the cryptocurrencies’ value remains completely speculatively constructed. Secondly, as with international bank transfers, cryptocurrencies need a bank account to buy and sell it. As explained above, having a bank account is not a given and represents a high barrier to entry for many of the poorest migrants.

https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/humanrights/2021/04/29/cryptocurrenc...

Go learn what Strike just achieved in El Salvador for example. It works in practice and in theory. A big issue is people barely understand Bitcoin and then they try to crtitize it and always seem to fail spectacularly

I can't find any statistics or independent account of what Strike supposedly achieved in El Salvador, but if you have one I'll look at it.

Blizzard uses BitTorrent to distribute their games and patches https://wowpedia.fandom.com/wiki/Blizzard_Downloader

"was" is an important word in the first sentence there. They finished moving away from BitTorrent in 2013, and they'd phased out actual p2p transfers in favor of just using the BT client to download from a web seed a while before that.

If bittorent is used by hundreds of millions of people, if thsts not mainstream then nothing is.

How it's being used is a different problem, but it's certainly effective and popular.

Aside from association with piracy and not being a dropbox alternative because you have to keep the seeder online, it's more expensive for network operators than CDNs, connections often have much more downstream bandwidth, and connections are still sometimes capped. If you're Netflix or an ISP, you're better off getting ISPs to put your hardware in their facilities than having users seed content. The most interesting, viable application I've seen for Bittorrent-like technology is Microsoft seeding updates on a LAN.

If BitTorrent is so great why isn’t it used more today for file transfers vs hosted storage? Also it is mostly used for piracy because authorities cannot shut down a decentralized system.

It is.

Blizzard has been using it for years: https://wowpedia.fandom.com/wiki/Blizzard_Downloader

This company is new and is using it as a CDN: https://www.peer5.com/

Bittorrent is everywhere, just like Linux, and you mostly don't notice it.

Blizzard was been using it for few years, and does not for 8 years now.

Because browsers (except only Opera, it's Norwegian) don't want to turn on built-in torrent downloader, only because they know they'd got troubles from RIAA folks. There are some websites that offer downloads through torrents, like linux distros.

Doesn't the Windows update system use some form of torrents for faster downloads?

I think Windows 10 Delivery Optimization tech is a great example of (nearly) decentralized tech:

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/deployment/update/w...

if I recall correctly, Blizzard's updater uses Bittorrent to distribute updates for WoW and other applications. So I'm confused by the fact people still focus on the piracy aspect of Bittorrent when there's been many commercial uses of the platform.

This article is laughably bad. I'm not even sure it's worth the time to give a counter response. The BitTorrent comment he made is objectively false and can be proven as such. Tons of game installers use torrents under the hood to distribute their massive game payloads.

Which game installers use torrents?

Blizzard and Star Citizen use torrents under the hood. Many others do as well, it's just hard to find documented confirmation.

she*

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