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Comment by moolcool | Hacker News Reader

BitTorrent slaps so hard as a protocol, and DHTs are absolutely brilliant. With all of the recent hype about decentralization with the rise of crypto, I'm surprised BitTorrent hasn't seen much hype or revitalization as well.

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I'm not surprised. BitTorrent just works, and doesn't provide any opportunity to separate people from their money.

It kind of does if you choose to seed stuff that is ripe for DMCA takedowns/copyright infringement, right?

That's not the protocol's fault, but it's pretty much one of the biggest reasons most common people use the protocol: to pirate.

Get caught pirating? Probably get some fines, right?

DMCA and most copyright holders would only hold power over ~4.25% of the population in the world, as the rest of us lives outside the US and are not impacted by US laws. Some countries like to pretend they actually handle DMCAs as well, but if you push back they won't even take it to court.

> Some countries like to pretend they actually handle DMCAs as well, but if you push back they won't even take it to court.

Sheesh, please do a more thorough research. It's technically not DMCA (because it's not called DMCA), but Germany and Japan do have similar laws analogous to DMCA, and I'm pretty sure that further digging would reveal more countries that have an analogous process written in law.

The DMCA was introduced in order to ratify the WICO Copyright Treaty[1]. Every signatory of the WIPO Copyright Treaty has similar laws on the books.

Though really you could argue that the Berne Convention already covers the most obvious copyright violations you get from torrents which means that effectively every country on Earth has laws against bare-faced copyright infringement. The WIPO Copyright Treaty is most notable for Article 11 which effectively prohibits the circumvention of technical measures (DRM).

It may be practically difficult to litigate someone in another country, but it has happened in the past[2].

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WIPO_Copyright_Treaty [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Pirate_Bay_trial

There is a whole scene around people spending 50-100/m just around this. There is a lot of money to be made if you live in the "right" countries.

Now that I think about it, BitTorrent is the best example of how well decentralisation can work, and basically the only reason I believe that a decentralised web is possible.

Unfortunately BitTorrent is still heavily centralized when it comes to discoverability. Without a website hosting .torrent files or magnet links, it's very limited.

There's always tribler

https://github.com/Tribler/tribler

I'm surprised nobody has build a torrent catalog on bittorrent itself. I think that with the DHT mutable item one should be able to publish a torrent containing a list of torrent with comments and updating the list easily.

It's not so simple. The juicy stuff is on private trackers and you can get into one only when invited. So you have a catalog of crap and not much more.

Not at all, a DHT crawler can gather Torrent links over time in a fully decentralized way.

Without curation it's not worth much.

These links are easy to mirror, they probably fit into a reasonably large SQLite file. Since the Web still allows decentralization, that doesn’t seem to be a problem. For example, the pirate bay is blocked in my country, yet I can still consult it on dozens of mirrors.

The creator of BitTorrent, Bram Cohen, is now full time focused on crypto: https://www.chia.net/

It's a novel layer 1 crypto with some interesting tech behind it. A lot of decentralized nodes inspiration from BT went into it as well.

To be fair, IPFS is a frequent player in the current hype, and is built on DHTs and obviously inspired by BitTorrent.

I think a major factor there is that IPFS supports pluggable transports, so it can easily be used in both backend and browsers environments directly, while WebTorrent (powered by WebRTC) can't directly communicate with most traditional BitTorrent clients (which use TCP/UDP directly) without going through a bridge node.

don't many traditional clients support webtorrent as well? https://feross.org/libtorrent-webtorrent/

This is part of why I'm a bit cynical about "web 3" in general. Bittorrent is terrific and yet the real money is streaming video/music platforms.

Bittorrent is basically revenue-hostile, so I don't expect it to get any more popular among content providers.

Because there's no built in coins, NFTs, or tokens that investors can pump and dump. In other words, it's an actually useful tool.

Web3 or whatever should've been based around the concepts present in BitTorrent, not crypto.

wouldnt it be something if we moved away from HTTP to a torrent web, at least for the substantial content of a website, and the HTTP relegated to fetching any HTML landing page with text and magnet links

So as far as I understand the protocol this is the principle behind Zeronet (https://zeronet.io/)

libtorrent was the first project I used Github Sponsor on. Arvid Nordberg is an absolute machine.

The project it's still in pre-alpha, it even stopped paying rewards to its token stakers/seeders due some technical issues during the implementation. Perhaps it just rushed onto it too fast just to catch the hype.

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