Excellent. By not teaching the younger generations about torrenting, we have failed them. Hopefully we can return to them being as active as they were in times past.
Self-hosting is close to dying.
Shoutcast style radio streaming is dying/dead.
Torrenting as mentioned is being suppressed.
Even an excellent use of P2P software, Skype, was forced to switch to non P2P technologies because of legal concerns.
Email is dying in favor of centrally owned IM services.
P2P IM services are being replaced by centrally owned ones.
P2P chat rooms like IRC are being replaced by centrally owned proprietary ones like Discord.
If people contributed a fraction of the money towards maintaining and building out these P2P options that they spend for the proprietary commercial options replacing them, they’d still be extremely viable.
But this is the tragedy of the commons the internet suffers from. Extremely valuable public goods are destroyed by billions of dollars of venture capital because those extremely valuable public goods have no mechanism to capture even the tiniest portion of the value they create to protect themselves from the onslaught of VC money which wants to privatize the value created by these public goods.
The key problem P2P technologies are going to solve, is monetizable self publishing. Self publishing is really the definition of P2P, and removing the middle-man is the name of the game. Bitcoin (not BTC) was invented exactly for the purpose of monetizing information, as the first sentence of the white paper defines it: "P2P cash for the internet."
The ideal scenario of exchanging money is the real world, in which we exchange money directly with one another with 0 (zero) middlemen.
The question which arises is, "What is the minimum number, of middle-men necessary for an internet transaction?" Could there be zero middle-men like in real life? The answer is no, zero middle-men are impossible, because someone has to keep the ledger data, and he requires a piece of the money transferred. With 1 (one) middle-man it is perfectly possible. The simplest such example are CBDC's issued by governments, but it could be a person, a P2P network or a company.
One use-case to illustrate the incentives is if Guyneth Palltrow visits the Oscars and she desires to publish a hundred photos to her fans. These photos are high-res of 10 MB each, so she wants to publish 1 GB of files. The most obvious place to share the photos is to post on Insta. She gets monetized by Instagram for all the traffic she attracts, but there are too many middle-men involved in her getting monetized. First of all Instagram is a middle-man, banks, and in case of international transfers governments as well. And each one of them gets a cut of the profits.
So Guyneth decides to publish her photos on torrents and getting monetized via Bitcoin. She effectively cuts out all middle-men, except one. But one problem remains: "How do we know who she is in the swarm of the peers, download the photos from her bandwidth and monetize her, instead monetizing random peers? We are her fans, amirite?"
That's where digital identities using ECSDA and social graphs kept immutable on a blockchain come into play. Hierarchies of identities for each person, merged into unions of pseudonymous accounts will enable information to flow where it needs to be. Money will flow where it needs to be as well.
Why do people keep seeding a 20 years old torrent ? Why do people still run tor relays and escape nodes ? Why do people keep editing wikipedia ? It's absolutely not for the money, it's because they feel it is useful for humanity, and it indeed is. Money, or rather the greed that fuels willing to be financially rewarded, is the reason people stopped P2P and embraced individualism and centralized platforms. A central platform is comfy, it's cozy, it's easy, and it treats me right... at least in the beginning, but then it's too late. The value is in the money that can be extracted from the other. P2P is complicated, it's hard to understand, but everyone is at the same level, I can talk to people if something's wrong and anyone can improve the situation. The value is in the service provided to the community.
Cryptocurrencies are the peak of individualism, they allow the commodification of not just the individual, but of interactions, of knowledge, of thoughts, of absolutely everything. It's the market everywhere, and now you need to have your wallet handy to write a message because you're going to pay for it. It's the illusion of equality and "all you need is a little bit of willpower" that the bourgeoisie inherently believes in but has never been true under a capitalist system, and capitalism actively fights against equality. The exchange of financial value is how inequalities are created; we must abandon the exchange of value and focus on growing usage value instead, the only system that ensures everyone is valued and keeps a little bit of control and power.
P2P is digital socialism. Centralization is digital capitalism. Let's not make the mistake a second time, let's put cryptocurrencies where they belong: in the trash
But money gives an answer to some problems, and in the absence of it, an efficient answer is not possible. Money gives the answer to the following problem: "Of all the producers of commodities, who is going to extend production?"
Imagine that the whole of Earth, has 3 farmlands in total. In one farmland avocados are produced. In the second farmland olives are produced. Two very similar foods. The third farmland is just uncultivated field. So both farmers, of avocados and olives want to extend production and buy the uncultivated land.
Which one will buy the uncultivated land? Let's suppose that avocados are more expensive than olives, and all 3 farmlands are of equal hectares. The producer of avocados, has bigger profits, so he is able to outbid the producer of olives. As soon as the farmer of avocados extends his production to the newly acquired land, he floods the market with more avocados, effectively making the avocados cheaper.
The same exact formulation can be applied to torrent seeders. Which one of the seeders we want to buy new computers and better internet connection? The seeders of information who are the fastest and more reliable, we want to extend their production and sharing of information.
In the information economy not all information has the same price. Information is the product. The farmland here is computers and optical fibres.
So, money is an automation. Automation as in the "increase of production".
Absolutely wrong. Money gives one answer, but it's not the most efficient: it's the one that profits the most to the one that already has the most. It doesn't benefit all the producers, and it doesn't benefit the consumers. It doesn't benefit society as a whole, because everyone is a competitor instead of working together.
Your example is interesting because you start with a situation that only exists in a capitalist society, as if that was a sensible default. You're basically taking the example of a duopoly, and show that keeping that duopoly with one actor taking even more place is... good ? When has an oligopoly ever been good ?
Why should the avocados producer make more avocados ? Do we need more avocados ? You say the land is uncultivated, but why is that a problem ? A third of earth with only avocados and another one with only olives is an absolute disaster in terms of ecology, biodiversity and health. It's the kind of situation where diseases are born. In that view, uncultivated land is something far more valuable than either farms, and yet, in your conclusion, the logical answer is to make even more avocados: that is a mistake on all accounts.
You say avocados are going to be cheaper, but that's completely oblivious to reality: a farmer who owns 2/3 of earth will not reduce their price. They will hold even more power, have even more influence over a capitalist governance and will do whatever they want. Again, when have the prices of an oligopoly ever decreased without intervention from a government ?
> The same exact formulation can be applied to torrent seeders. Which one of the seeders we want to buy new computers and better internet connection? The seeders of information who are the fastest and more reliable, we want to extend their production and sharing of information.
That's opposite to P2P. We don't want bigger torrent seeders, we want more torrent seeders. we don't want to centralize production of information, we want to distribute it.
Now, sure, money is needed to buy equipment, connection, and time. But we need money only because those things are not gratis. Which is why we must fight for more domains free of exchange of value: if more things do not need money, more people will be able to share information. Inequalities will vanish.
> So, money is an automation. Automation as in the "increase of production".
Anyone who's been paying attention to the climate change discussion in the past 50 years should understand that "Increase of production" is definitely the last thing we want.
>That's opposite to P2P. We don't want bigger torrent seeders, we want more torrent seeders.
We can have both kinds of seeders. More seeders and better ones as well. These properties are not mutually exclusive.
>Anyone who's been paying attention to the climate change discussion in the past 50 years should understand that "Increase of production" is definitely the last thing we want.
Believe it or not, production of food, housing, transportation will increase exponentially, and follow the familiar S curve trajectory. Human population will increase exponentially, i forecast one trillion people by the end of the century (2.100), one quadrillion by the end of 2.200 and so on.
The environment and earth will be thriving as well because new wealth will be created out of thin air. We will not need as many resources to create wealth, like we do today. Rare earth minerals, petroleum and more will not be necessary in the future to create wealth.
We're overdue for a resurgence of punk rock style DIY tech culture IMO. The distrust and distain for the big technology companies is already there among young people.
The other day I was trying to download Blade Runner: The Final Cut. I went to “1337x” but I just kept getting ads wherever I clicked. Yuck. The whole experience just felt humiliating. In the end I just opened Apple’s “TV” app and bought the movie for $9 instead. Hopefully a (small) portion of that will go to the funding of new great movies. (Well, the odds for that might be high, but one can still dream…)
With that said, if anyone knows of any decent trackers out there, feel free to get in touch. (My e-mail is in my profile.)
According to [0] the domain x1337x·eu should be a real mirror, and it definitely has ads.
torrents can be shared with content identifiers, magnet links ,which don't need to be hosted on a server.
There err also private trackers file list and iptorrents are not hard to get into i hear
In my case, I have to pirate the movie because I couldn't find any streaming service which stream my movie, especially the director's cut or final cut. I once paid apple to buy a movie just to find out that half of the movie is cut due to censorship.
I usually browse torrent sites in incognito mode, where uBlock is not active. Perhaps I should just set up a new browser profile for that instead.
PS. OTOH, I’m not really shure why I should trust a site that sends me away to other sites when I click on links. Talk about dark pattern…
https://github.com/Jackett/Jackett
Qbittorrent uses plugins to the sites themselves (including to the local Jackett instance via an API):
https://github.com/qbittorrent/search-plugins/wiki/Unofficia...
And it's what I use to search for torrents.
I would never trust a site without an adblocker and keep uBlock active in Private Mode.
But with all this, you need to know what you're searching for, browsing for content is another story
I use it all the time (today, yesterday, the day before) and I've never seen an ad, or even clicked on one on l337x.
I can pretty much guess your browser from the experience you posted.
Use Firefox. You won't notice a performance difference, all the pages still work, and the web is so much nicer.
I like uBlock Origin but these anti-patterns really leaves a bad taste in my mouth.
Worse, many are getting deeper into the CG NAT on IPv4 with possibly no ipv6 available. Combined with households having more people and devices needing the internet from the same router than ever before, makes it less likely someone is just going to figure out how to forward a port.
Sure, there are some workarounds, but the real failure here is in not moving to ipv6 and fiber fast enough to support any p2p tech. There’s basically zero generations that ever had p2p ready internet.
(thinking about it, it's not clear this had to be the case, the phone lines were made for symmetric communication but dial-up was subsumed by cable providers - we got higher speeds but only because it was in the broadcasters' interest to sell us media packages, they were never going to help us send files to each other)
So long as people seed for some time, there tends to be amazing availability and absurdly fast speeds.
I'd love exact numbers but my impression is 80%+ of consumer wifi routers ship with upnp-igd and often Apple's nat-pmpd, which means any torrent program you open worth a salt will port-forward just fine. I can't think of the last household wifi I was on that didn't have upnp-igd, it's been so long.
In some ways p2p has been underinvested in because it has worked so well for so long. Various public & private trackers have come and gone but theres been a variety of good-enough options. Tribler pioneered p2p search over BitTorrent a long time ago & some users report that works surprisingly well for them & I think maybe that technique is semi widely done in clients now.
I think the main thing is just getting new folks in the door, and setup to find stuff. Bandwidth & connectivity seem pretty great. But we keep having major trackers collapse, and it's unclear how to get people started & successful.
Clicking around in my providers web panel yesterday I discovered they went so far as to serve up my downloads directory over http behind basic auth so I can download things directly to my phone while on the go.
A little bit more secret sauce: I have a script that rsyncs everything from the downloads/kids dir into a folder the kids can access on the Linux machine plugged into the TVs (and idem for the adults dir for wifey and me).
It is always the year of Linux on the desktop if you're willing to make your family suffer! Freedom from the copyright subscription fascists etc...
The main change has been the glut of free file hosting and cloud drives which negate the need for torrents.