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Comment by EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK | Hacker News Reader

I am old enough to remember when all torrenting was decentralized (edonkey, imesh, napster and million others). Then, all of a sudden, everyone switched to torrents, that rely on [centralized] web sites for search. I guess convenience always beats privacy.

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Napster, KaZaA and most of the initial wave of p2p sharing had centralized servers which were required for coordination. That's why it got shut down. The record companies sued the companies behind them and won, forcing them to shutdown their networks.

The second wave of Gnutella and all of the various BitTorrent clients was decentralized. No single entity controlled the network so there was no single point of failure. Record companies and movie studios came after individual nodes, but were never ever to shut down the network.

However, no one ever invented a great way to do search and discovery on top of BitTorrent, so we've always had centralized servers for that piece.

It doesn't (strictly) need to have centralized search; you can passively collect info from the DHT swarm and build up an index over time of torrents people are sharing.

It's not as convenient as something like napster or the like, but we've also got this draft <http://bittorrent.org/beps/bep_0051.html> to make it a bit better.

> you can passively collect info from the DHT swarm and build up an index over time

For anyone wanting to pursue this, I feel like I can share, I used this recently https://github.com/boramalper/magnetico, people share database dumps regularly. I found ~4 DB dumps and merging scripts are all you need to get up and running.

Because we needed curation. Very large proportion of the p2p content was viruses/malware etc or fake (you thought you were downloading A, but in fact you were downloading B).

With links in centralized websites and fora we at least had a little more confidence on the safety/quality of the content.

this.

To make decentralised search work you need to solve the trust problem. Strangers sharing content with you without spam, decoys, and malware. You need to create trust without any central coordinator. Crawling the DHT for content is not going to get you Google-quality search. The Tribler lab is working on the web-of-trust problem and decentralised (ledger) accounting since pre-Bitcoin days. Its a stubborn problem. But we're making consistent progress. Latest peer-reviewed science: https://www.ifaamas.org/Proceedings/aamas2021/pdfs/p1263.pdf

  -Tribler team

You generally can't catch viruses from mp3 or video files. As for the games, I very much doubt a torrent web site can check hundreds of gigabyte-sized .exe files for trojans. So I wouldn't recommend torrenting games on the same computer you store your Bitcoin wallet.

edonkey and napster required bootstrap nodes, I think? and sending your search terms out to other peers on the network could be considered less private, depending on your view.

You can search bittorrent via DHT in a similar manner (I'm unsure if the bootstrap nodes there are strictly required) or search an indexer website from one IP then use the magnet link to download from another IP.

Privacy is not the only drawback of centralization. It is also easier to take down by simply disabling the central component. Although not used as much as during the 90's, some decentralized networks like gnutella and kademlia are still to this day.

Jumping from edonkey/emule to torrent was a night and day difference on speed and convenience.

Those were all Peer2peer services, but none of them were torrenting.

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