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Comment by guidovranken | Hacker News Reader

BitTorrent is amazing. It just works. Anyone anywhere can create a torrent of their files, dump the magnet link somewhere, and everyone else can reliably retrieve it. It is self-reinforcing; the more people using a torrent, the better the robustness, redundancy and download speeds. You can often get better speeds from downloading something via torrent than from a web server. It's an open protocol that is relatively easy to implement, it has a diversity of lightweight clients for all OSes and is fairly resistant to censorship. To me it's pretty much perfect tech that solves a real problem. I hope Bram Cohen got rich off of it somehow.

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Wish browsers had built in support for it. Imagine if by default most downloads were through BitTorrent, and your browser would then seed the file for 1.5x the download size and time.

WebTorrent gets you pretty close.

https://webtorrent.io/

The Opera browser did for a short while. If I recall correctly, it was taken out since sysadmins at schools, workplaces, etc would ban the browser. Of course that behavior unfortunately ensured that bittorrent would remain a protocol mostly for piracy.

Brave supports bittorrent natively and is basically a reskinned Chrome without the spyware.

..but includes a cryptocurrency scam scheme.

Support in the browser would require the browser to stay on the whole time, along with the computer. Bittorrent clients are better run on small less power hungry boards (RPi, etc.) or on hardware that is meant to be running 24/7 anyway. For example, I run the Transmission daemon on my XigmaNAS home file server. The NAS is headless, but I can control the daemon through its remote GUI, so as soon as I click on a torrent or magnet link on the browser, it calls the local Transmission GUI which sends the info to the client on the NAS which starts the download freeing the browser and the PC of any further work.

https://xigmanas.com/xnaswp/

https://github.com/transmission-remote-gui/transgui

I don’t know about others, but my browser is open about 100% of the time

Yea this was a super weird complaint. My browser is open for far more time than my torrent app.

It doesn't require the browser to be always on, unless you want to download something (which is the same as a normal download). Do you mean it's better for the health of the swarm for a particular file? Otherwise I'm not sure I get your point.

> Do you mean it's better for the health of the swarm for a particular file?

That is one of the main points. Some files are shared by thousands users and can be downloaded in seconds, but others are much harder to find, so that I like to keep the client on to help other people getting it quickly. I usually am annoyed when a file with a single seed reaches like 97% then it dies until the following day because the seeder had to turn off the PC, so I try to avoid this, especially since it costs me nothing as broadband is flat and the client runs on a machine that is always on.

https://press.opera.com/2006/02/06/opera-integrates-bittorre...

It would absolutely not require that, it only requires that someone's browser is open when you're trying to download, which is likely since most people have their browsers open a lot.

A major browser supporting torrents would be a disaster for public torrent culture. Since everyone closes their browsers, people would seed substantially less. I have a theory that a good chunk of people seeding any given torrent on a public tracker are doing it unintentionally.

EDIT: closes their browser is a bad way to phrase it. The problem is that the fact that they are seeding would be more in their face instead of hidden away in a notification icon on hover.

I wonder if intellectually "property" groups thought of this playing out.

> a good chunk of people seeding any given torrent on a public tracker are doing it unintentionally.

a person i know (totally not me) only seeds the rarer things. for more popular stuff they only seed for a couple of days.

BitTorrent itself doesn't provide any privacy, which is critical for something like a web browser. If anyone in the world can query what you've downloaded, it can escalate into real issues.

Brave Browser has it

This would cripple home internet connections, where the upstream is usually a tiny fraction of the downstream bandwidth. Most of the stuff people download is created/hosted by big companies. Let them pay for bandwidth instead of individual home users (looking at you, Blizzard and other game companies who like to use torrents to distribute patches).

I'll give you some technobabble: traffic shaping, ack-priorization, quality of service, traffic class.

All things which your home gateway should have in one form, or another, where you designate torrenting a priority which doesn't interfere with the rest of your activities. And adapting dynamically. No need to think about how to slice available bandwith into pieces beforehand.

Nice in theory, but as far as I've seen, most home routers and devices don't utilize those, and most users don't know how to configure them, and the up/down ratio is so vast (like mine is 1000/20, a 50x difference) that it's hard to saturate the down without first maxing the up in a torrent. The exception to that is it you happen to get some phat-piped seeds who are willing to send to you super fast even if you're uploading at a trickle. But in that case, plain old HTTP would've worked better anyway.

At the end of the day the bottleneck isn't at the protocol level, but the asymmetry of home cable connections. Torrents are great when you have symmetric fiber, but very few homes do right now.

But you also need to find the file first. And sites to search for files are unreliable, often get banned. I remember long before bit torrent there were protocols like napster, edonkey, imesh etc that included search function and were superior to bit torrent in this aspect. Unfortunately, bad design won.

Qbittorrent client has a built in search engine. Add the jackett plugin and you can search every public tracker in one click.

I haven't visited a torrent site in years.

This is cool, but unfortunately the best content is on private trackers (you also need them to reduce the risk of abuse reports to your provider).

Not sure if the need to use private trackers can be fixed by the protocol, though. But, maybe adding a bit more of anonymity would be enough? i2p torrents provide that, but sacrifice speed. Clearly it's a spectrum and we need more "points" in the middle of it.

I disagree completely. I downloaded my first torrent months after the first client was released and my latest yesterday. In those 17 years I've never failed to find what I need and never had any problems with ISP(and would use a VPN if I did). I've never felt the need to check out private trackers.

I disagree completely. I downloaded my first torrent months after the first client was released and my latest yesterday. In those 20 years I've never failed to find what I need and never had any problems with ISP(and would use a VPN if I did). I've never felt the need to check out private trackers.

It depends on how niche your tastes are, or how specific you are about quality. Getting Blu-Ray REMUX files for smaller, forgotten movies on public trackers is nigh impossible in my experience. Meanwhile, private trackers gives the community incentive to seed these large torrents with tiny swarms.

It is probably a matter of what kind of content you're after. I do retro game preservation and private trackers are often the only option for certain sets and certainly the most up to date ones.

> But you also need to find the file first

No. He's describing a distributor's options. You are describing a consumer's problem. Specifically pirate comsumers.

He doesn't need to find his own file; he needs to distribute it. Publishing is a separate issue. With napster, you only had one publishing option: napster.com. With torrents, you have many. As he said, "just dump the magnet link somewhere".

> Unfortunately, bad design won.

You're comparing apples and oranges. Napster and bittorent are different tools that solve different problems.

He's describing general issues involved in distributing something.

You're describing specific issues involved in stealing.

Saying "bad design won" is like saying hammers are a bad design compaired to hypodermic needles because you can't use a hammer to inject yourself with heroin.

Well, like it or not, stealing is 99.9% of practical usage of bittorrent.

I'd assume he got rich off Chia - not nearly as elegant as bittorrent.

Honest question: how much of the torrent content is corrupted in some way? I dabbled with file sharing back when Kazaa was a thing and I infected my computer to the point I had to reinstall the operating system and I "learned my lesson." But maybe I overlearned the lesson, and it can be used reliably?

Kazaaa has nothing to do with torrents, but what do you mean by corrupted?

Torrenting can cause a fragmenting issue, but defragging clears that up. And like anywhere else, random executables sometimes contain malware but there's nothing inherent in torrents that makes that more likely.

I meant “file sharing” more generally not “torrents” specifically (I edited my previous comment). I don’t know what exactly happened to my computer but I suspect malware. While not inherent to torrents, it does seem inherent in sharing of random executables. Have the trust issues improved? What are some good use cases of torrents?

So while Kazaa and the like eventually got the ability to actually download from multiple sources, and be able to see that a particular source is popular, as I recall from the early 2000 days, back then it was pure point to point. That is, if you chose to download something, you also were implicitly choosing what source to download it from. So even if five people had the file "Foo", you chose which one to download, and there was no way to know that 4 had the same file "Foo", and 1 person had something else, with no way to know which was what you wanted.

Torrents avoid many of those issues; you can see how many seeds a file has (though Kazaa and the like later added that). And you had to have gotten the magnet link from somewhere, which would have its own evaluatable trust. It's the difference between downloading file called "Foo" from random internet user's computer, and going to a website, that you know, and downloading a file called "Foo" that you also know has been downloaded, and retained, by X number of users.

I don’t think torrents are any different in that aspect from the rest of the web.

Just as you would download and run an executable from a trusted source, you can download a torrent of an executable (from that trusted source) and run it.

E.g. many Linux distributions offer torrent links next to regular downloads; if you trust that website, you can download either file.

It's mostly like the rest of the web, though another commenter is right that seeds demonstrate a small amount of trust. If I'm on some random public warez site, my executable is likely to be malware. If I'm on something like the Internet Archive, Debian's site, or /r/datahoarder, their torrents are likely just a more efficient way to share data.

> . I don’t know what exactly happened to my computer but I suspect malware.

Yes, that's very plausible.

> Have the trust issues improved?

If you're retrieving executable code, the source giving you the magnet link is usually given some implicit trust. A good practice is to distribute a hash or better still a signature of the file(s). Though I would expect BitTorrent is designed to protect the shared contents' extents via hashes too.

If the content is some multimedia, then ideally it could be untrusted. Your favorite OS probably has much more robust libraries handling the multimedia content than it did a decade ago. But ultimately if the content distributed is infringing then it probably comes from a less trustworthy source. In which case you should have a different posture when handling these untrusted files than the generally untrusted interwebs content.

> Torrenting can cause a fragmenting issue...

It can, but the clients I use(d) had an option like 'preallocate space', or similar. Then it doesn't, at least not as much.

Also getting to like 98% and not completing the download. Very aggravating

Does the BitTorrent protocol have an announcement / stored metadata of "recently highest percentage of file seen"?

This seems like one of the biggest problems with more decentralized torrents (i.e. ones not backed by a community / core seeder), but also most a UX issue and seemingly trivially solvable.

No, but clients do advertise how much of the torrent they have, so you can glance at your peer list and if you have 2 peers stuck at 10%... there's a good chance that you won't get more than 10%.

Yeah, and while current peer % is useful, it doesn't answer the other user question of "What percent of this thing has been seen anywhere recently?"

Which seems a pretty reasonable question for a user to have, if we're talking about fully decentralized torrents without a tracker.

QBittorrent will tell you if the swarm is currently missing any pieces. But it doesn't have historical data.

I'd add uTorrent... it was created in few kb and AFAIK that started the no-bloatware awareness for sometime.

I don't know if it started the no-bloatware awareness, that was a remnant of the 90s, where programs were non-bloated by default (with Winamp being the most non-bloated program to ever have been created).

Even just in the universe of piracy programs, Kazaa and it's offshoots got bloated, so Kazaa lite became the no-bloat version of that

I don't think he did unfortunately.

He's currently creating a cryptocurrency.

Why this over ipfs?

BitTorrent is 20 years old, IPFS only 6. So, might just come down to familiarity. Definitively many more people, even outside tech crowd, have heard of BitTorrent whereas IPFS is still mostly unknown.

Because I pushed petabytes of data over it for the past 15 years and it never failed me, not once. Simple as that.

One benefit of ipfs is that you can use cloud flare as a gateway, which is pretty cool. Don't know of anything similar for torrents (from a reputable company).

Speaking from my own experience, I've had a harder time getting data from here to there via ipfs. It's been a year or two since I last tried, but as I recall my troubles were the following:

* Transfers never starting, or not being able to exceed kbps. * Large amounts of data makes client performance worse. * Adding data to the store doubles the disk space used unless you take extra steps to mitigate that.

Meanwhile, I can point mktorrent at a folder, load it in my clients, and have it saturate my link within seconds/a couple minutes.

I'm keeping a close eye on IPFS and the Dat Project to take over here (and my use of Syncthing), but I'm hoping some refinement can happen first.

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