Comment by hypertele-Xii | Hacker News Reader

Comment by hypertele-Xii | Hacker News Reader

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While you're technically correct, the protocol is resilient to such attack, as the number of people participating in a particular torrent is a good indicator of its validity. After all, everyone who was fooled will delete and stop sharing such items.

New releases of something that just came out tend to suffer from this, though. Sometimes the counterfeits reach escape velocity - the rate of people joining in downloading the counterfeit exceed the rate of people realizing and stopping, thus giving the illusion of a legit torrent.

Currently this problem is being solved by torrent sites' reputation and comment systems. If we imagine a world where only decentralized indexes like Bitmagnet exist, your prediction is 100% accurate. This only works if reputation from a reliable site is bootstrapping the initial popularity of a torrent.

(btw my comment was/is about the DHT crawler)

You are describing a pay-to-play model. The validator is if the seeder/leech count is high. Well does DHT provide aggregate bandwidth of each torrent? If not, you can easily spin up 1000+ nodes and connect to your torrent. Tada fake popularity. If bandwidth is known, then you simply raise your costs a bit by running fake clients. There are anti-piracy groups who's entire mandate is to provide noise in the piracy ecosystem. Food for thought: bandwidth costs for this would be a rounding error for e.g. MGM, Universal, or any major content creator.

DHT does not offer any sort of reputation or comment system. Back to centralized torrenting which is why I suspect DHT crawling has not been a very popular feature

> If not, you can easily spin up 1000+ nodes and connect to your torrent. Tada fake popularity. If bandwidth is known, then you simply raise your costs a bit by running fake clients.

Sure, but like the other commenter said, this has been possible for years, and yet public trackers aren't swamped with fake torrents. I think in all my years of using BitTorrent I've only ever found a single fake torrent, where the content was inside an encrypted RAR with no key (obviously there was no way to know it was encrypted ahead of time).

You are making my point. A decentralized system will be abused with spam and fraud. A centralized system allows you to moderate the results.

It seems like it would be pretty easy to make it appear that your spam torrent is highly active.

You are correct.

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