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Comment by maxklein | Hacker News Reader

The real genius in bittorrent does not lie in it's technological superiority, but in it's bravery and simplicity.

The idea that people will continue to upload the file after they have downloaded it seemed silly before someone actually did it. Using a http tracker was going against the trend that all the other protocol designers were following at the time.

Then someone made it, and it became a big hit. Just like YouTube - it sounds technologically silly before it is done. NOW it's easy to see how obvious it is, but before it was done, it was not the same way.

Bram Cohen is the polar opposite of Ian Clarke, and that's why his project is so much more successful.

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> The idea that people will continue to upload the file after they have downloaded it seemed silly before someone actually did it.

This part had been well-validated before BitTorrent came out. People were already using Napster, Kazaa, and AudioGalaxy, all of which relied on people leaving files available for upload after they finished downloading them.

Using an HTTP tracker was a pretty courageous act though, and I don't think the rest of the protocol would work without it. At the time, everyone was doing desktop clients and trying to make things as anonymous as possible, since they were all afraid of copyright-infringement lawsuits.

I kinda wonder whether Bram really didn't know it would be used for copyright infringement, or if he just says that because he's smart enough not to get sued. Every other P2P filesharing system was used to share music, and the mainstream media was going on and on about how Napster was the death of the music industry. You'd have to be living under a rock not to make that connection.

with kazaa/etc, you share all the files in your library. so if i download one, then unless i remove it from the library folder i share it every time i download anything. so it's kinda different. bittorrent doesn't share old stuff.

That's nothing, every operating system was used for copyright infrighment too! Bill Gates has clearly contemplated mass-scale music downloading when creating windows, unless he was living under the rock.

Sarcasm aside, universal tools are like that - people use them for many things.

My curiosity is because every other P2P filesharing tool written before BitTorrent was used for copyright infringement. Bill Gates is a different situation, because there were no PCs before he wrote Altair Basic. There were plenty of P2P filesharing services before BitTorrent, though.

You can't predict the future, but you ought to have a pretty good idea what's happening in the present.

Yes, but there was no client when Bram did it. It was a download window like in a browser.

Same goes for Audiogalaxy. (Doesn't AudioGalaxy's founder occasionally show up on this board?) It was a web page where you could see what music people were sharing, search for it, and then download it. When you downloaded a file, it would download a small stub (via the browser's mechanism), which would then be opened by the AudioGalaxy service on the client, which would queue up the file for later downloading.

I remember arriving at college, where each person had their own pet ways of downloading MP3s. Within a week, my whole dorm had basically standardized on AudioGalaxy.

The real genius of bittorrent is how it brings together many people who are interested in sharing the same file all at once so you get great download/upload speeds. This mostly isn't even due to the protocol itself but in the way that torrent sites tend to present the torrents chronologically.

Plus there is no bandwidth wasted on sharing content other than what you are interested in. Almost every other client wants to make you share all kinds of other stuff to even use the network: emule, freenet, tor, i2p, gnutella, etc.

Finally, pure luck has allowed the laws to progress in a way that hasn't resulted in the immediate shutdown or blocking of popular torrent sites. It should be noted that in certain countries this isn't the case and bittorrent has been a total failure there.

Also, on the majority of American college campuses today, bittorrent is a huge failure because it is easily fingerprinted and will get you banned from the network. Maybe they have finally added some stenography to protect against this but not that I know of. Then, there are the large ISPs that are degrading or blocking bittorrent now.

Of course, everyone knows that the real reason bittorrent beat freenet is because bittorrent was python and freenet was a big steaming pile of java:)

Along that tangent:

The use of torrent files as a universal link to the downloadable material is also genius. It removes the need for implementing a costly peer-2-peer search mechanism (Gnutella and Kazaa spent quite a lot of resources on search), and a potentially cluttered GUI. Instead, the torrent files can be distributed in any way people find convenient, eg. www, e-mail or RSS.

On top of that, including the tracker-URL transparently in the torrent file is a huge usability improvement. No more searching for lists of super-nodes to enter the network, as was the case with Gnutella.

This was really what took him out. Nobody at the time thought to use a file to share all the meta information. It was always about urls or ip addresses or so on. He did not try to reinvent the world, he just took things that worked and put them together.

But isn't also BitTorrent much faster than other protocols of that time, because of the way it distributes packages? (Meaning that all downloaders become uploaders almost at the time they start downloading)

The real genius in bittorrent does not lie in it's technological superiority, but in it's bravery and simplicity.

This is true of many, if not most gamechanging breakthroughs. Skype wasn't the first IP telephony provide - but they made it simple and were brave.

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