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Comment by wppick | Hacker News Reader

XMPP, bittorrent, now blockchain. All 3 have the same thing in common that they had high hopes of creating a distributed alternative future for their paradigm. The first 2 fizzled into mostly fringe usage. I guess we'll have to wait and see if blockchain follows the same path, but seems to be going that way

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Torrents are still going strong and quite useful if you need (say) a movie or TV show that's legally unobtainable in your country.

Or if I want an Ubuntu iso in less than 3 hours

Or if you want to download an offline version of wikipedia.

It's gotten better for me. I'm able to download from the closest mirror (University of Arizona) at 30 MB/s

But I remember back in the Napster days when P2P was going to revolutionise the world and forever alter the media landscape.

And yet despite all the technology having been built and stable the trend in media has been overwhelmingly towards centralisation e.g. Spotify, Netflix and an all you can eat model.

It's because ultimately users care about the experience above all else.

That, and some of these things got sued into oblivion.

Not just that, companies like Blizzard save millions in server costs.

Do they still use torrents though? I was under the impression that virtually all companies using torrents had discontinued it as disruption to users internet quality and possibly data usage caps meant it was easier to just pay the cost of distribution.

Possibly, it's been a while since I've used it.

Companies make weird decisions all the time, like MS killing Skype's p2p system which destroyed the whole app. Quoting mobile as the reason when there was no reason the PC/Mac clients couldn't continue on.

Tbh I can't think of a single commercial p2p product left. Mobile was certainly the driving force, but I think better/cheaper cloud infrastructure contributed. These days all the major content distribution companies have static content positioned inside ISP data centers so its fairly cheap and fast to distribute.

Even laptops probably contributed. A lot of people are going to be using laptops on the go and connected to mobile hotspots. You'd be pissed off if a game client used all of your battery and data cap in the background. Even the p2p of Skype was a pain, you had to carefully coordinate the transfer of large files. You both had to stay online and manually restart them. While now the central server holds it and it’s way more convenient.

Edit: I just remembered that windows lets you opt in to p2p updates but that's the only thing I can think of.

I think what made Skype popular was it worked everywhere and was quite good at bypassing firewalls/DPI. It was everyone's goto as it had a high chance of success especially in schools/uni.

CGNAT could be another explanation.

I still don't see why you wouldn't try and have p2p as a back channel that's attempted. If it can increase deployment speeds and improve user experience then its a huge plus.

Think of any software updates at schools or Steam updates in a block of units. Most consoles and PC games still spend too much time with loading bars pulling 20 Gb updates.

Slow updates isn’t really fixed by p2p though. Steam downloads run as fast as your internet speed. P2P can’t be any faster than that other than some highly unlikely situation that another machine on your local network already has the game.

And that’s where p2p died. CDNs got really really fast and the user benefit reduced to nothing while the possible disruption from seeding large files remained. Especially as consumer upload isn’t that great so any uploading can disrupt online games.

Nope they don't. It's based on http and CDNs now.

https://github.com/HearthSim/keg#what-is-ngdp

Users don't care how much the server costs are though. They care about their experience.

Which is why torrents has really fallen away in favour of fast CDNs.

I don't XMPP was meant to be "distributed," at least not in the way that the BitTorrent network is (and blockchains nominally are). XMPP assumes a relatively normal client-server architecture, but with no authoritative index server. That makes it decentralized in the way that IRC and SMTP are, but doesn't imply anything about consensus or peer coordination.

(More stridently: even as "failures," both XMPP and BitTorrent have probably been significantly better for the world, on net, than blockchain projects have been.)

I find this comment surprising because I don’t know what I’d do without BitTorrent - what are the alternatives? Edonkey, gnutella, etc are all dead. Just yesterday I downloaded an entire series in a matter of minutes thanks to BitTorrent. That would’ve taken ages over emule.

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