BitTorrent has a new version now BitTorrent v2 you will see this in BitTorrent clients that support it like qBitTorrent in ways like info hash v2 its still getting better v1 and v2 are not inoperable because some of the changes can not work together but you can create hybrid torrents that can work in both. https://www.libtorrent.org/features-ref.html#bittorrent-v2 https://blog.libtorrent.org/2020/09/bittorrent-v2/
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I never used torrent as much as the last years
This seems like a dumb question, BitTorrent absolutely is still relevant and probably the most popular method of file sharing in the scene. Foss groups use it too for distributing ISO files for Operating systems, and it might even be used as the video hosting provider in future Fediverse YouTube alternatives (I've heard talk of a video hosting platform on Fedi which uses activitypub for everything else but hosts videos via BitTorrent) pretty cool stuff.
So yeah BitTorrent is still relevant, and it makes sense since if it isn't broken why fix it? Not to say that it couldn't be better, the biggest problem with it is the anonymity issue, but until someone makes something better BitTorrent will continue to be popular, and the ideal choice for decentralized file sharing, especially in the piracy scene.
Almost always I find torrenting the most convenient method to download anything. When someone puts some file up for download and that person uses one of those stupid free file hosters, I usually get annoyed by "disable ad blocker", slow dl speeds, etc.
A torrent makes things so much more convenient.
The article you linked answers most of your questions.
- Relative global upstream traffic went down, but not due to other file-sharing protocols but entirely different applications
- I2P is not mentioned anywhere in the article, nor any other sharing alternative
- VPN is mentioned as a potential reason for not being able to identify torrent traffic; VPN has become much more prevalent and promoted in the scene
- The article says, in piracy, streaming websites are much more popular now
It has not been surpassed by another protocol. The relative numbers don't say much about absolute numbers or usage.
And 10 % of global internet upload is certainly no irrelevancy.
Most piracy is either two ancient methods that work perfectly of Usenet or BitTorrent. There is nothing wrong with these methods.
Usenet has many things wrong with it, NNTP is not at all designed for distributing large files, it's for propagating messages across servers. File integrity checks have to be tacked on for instance, and the few servers still serving binaries are commercial services that are vulnerable to copyright trolls.
Considering that USENET goes back to the 70s, and bittorrent was invented in 2001, one of these things is clearly ancient and the other isn’t.
2001 was 24 years ago in 2 days. BitTorrent can drink.
It's still newer than HTML, CSS, and Javascript.
I dislike this fact, because I very clearly remember when it was brand spanking new
Yeah and each torrent was its own separate window with no pause option.
Haha yes! 20 little BitTorrent windows ticking along
I remember when eDonkey and later eMule were brand spanking new... It took quite a while for BitTorrent to gain enough traction (and for me to get fast enough internet) for it to be better... (and, frankly, I still miss eMule's Kademlia network's peer to peer search capabilities...)
Ed2k/kad are still kicking, I use mldonkey for that networks
Yeah that’s pretty ancient to me. That’s like saying XP isn’t ancient
I2p is not a more efficient file sharing protocol.
You may be thinking about ipfs, which is a file sharing protocol, but I wouldn't say that is more efficient than bittorrent afaik.
What the what? More relevant than ever. How is this a legitimate question? I2p is great but adoption is extremely low.
How is this a legitimate question?
It's not.
Yes it's very much alive and very important. A lot of industries (like their products: books, movies but also games) are getting restricted, taken away, taking down and removed from other platforms. Old ROM sites are taken down. And platforms like archive.org need to remove all their books.
The problem is, that there is nobody archiving anymore.. because it's not allowed due to "copyright infringement". In the end, all these products like books, movies and (old) games might be gone forever. Next generations will not be able to have access to it. This is what worries me the most. And Torrent might be the only way to fix/solve it. By distributing these kind of material. Especially older books, older movies and older games.
Yea, hoarders and seeders are cultural heroes, to me
Torrenting is a decentralized approach and the corpo parasite hates it because there is nothing they can do about it, short of shutting down the internet lol
Get fuck Disney
It's alive and well. My independent research shows that torrents of users are using it for large foss packages, as well as various media.
This duck in a hoodie shows how both technologies can function together. https://hackyourmom.com/en/pryvatnist/bittorrent-cherez-i2p-dlya-anonimnogo-obminu-fajlamy/
Eh, DDL links go dead all the time, torrents are alive even after years after a show last aired.
I always go to 🏴☠️ bay whenever I look for a tv show or movie.
🏴☠️ bay still exists? Really? Is it still legit or now a honeypot?
I don't really care. You should be using a VPN for torrents anyways. I mostly pirate movies and TV shows so there nearly zero malware risk as long as the system and the VLC is up to date.
The official site is the🏴☠️bay[dot]org
🏴☠️ is a singular word, don't add an "s" for no reason.
I use Torrent daily, I basically never stop seeding what I download to my Plex Server and I also use a Real Debrid account, which essentially caches the torrents to their servers for us to stream through different methods (like Kodi, Stremio, or more recently for me Plex thanks to Riven/Zurg).
A better question is, what would you improve over current way that torrents work.
I wish there were some way to enable availability to persist even when torrents' peak of popularity has passed - some kind of decentralized, self-healing archive where a torrent's minimal presence on the network was maintained. Old torrents then could become slow but the archival system would prevent them being lost completely, while distributing storage efficiently. Maybe this isn't practical in terms of storage, but the tendency of bittorrent to lose older content can be frustrating.
I don't see what you can do at the protocol level to improve availability, you still need people storing the file and acting as peers. Some trackers try to improve that by incentivizing long term seeding.
A better question is; What would you change in the current Internet/WWW to make it as decentralized as Torrents are?
I wish there was a decentralised way of hosting websites. Kind of like torrents.
I'm personally trying to fix it.. https://libreweb.org. Still a proof of concept though.
Sounds like maybe what you're looking for is ipfs? https://ipfs.tech/
Problem with IPFS, is that it's not really that decentralized as I wish it was. Since by default the data is not shared across the network, meaning if nobody is downloading and hosting that node, you are still the only one having a copy of the data. Meaning if your connection is gone or if you get censored, there is no other node where the IPFS data is living. It only works if somebody else is activily downloading the data.
Ow, and then you also need to Pin the content, or the data will be removed again -,-
Furthermore, the look-up via DHT is very slow and resolving the data is way too slow in order to make sense. People expect today max 1 or 2 seconds look-up time + page load would result in 4 or 5 seconds.. Max... However with IPFS this could be 20, 30 seconds or even minutes...
That would be very cool, I know we have onion sites that operate on the Tor network that use keypairs for the domains, but the sites themselves are still centrally hosted by a person, anonymously hosted but still centrally hosted.
There is actually a JS library called Planktos that can serve static websites over BitTorrent. I don't know how good it is, but it sounds like a starting point.
The protocol is still relevant. Is there anything better yet with enough people using it that it's relatively easy to find anything you want through it?
Also your article just says streaming and cloud services are more popular with the masses. Where does it say torrenting is replaced by another piracy method
It's more relevant then ever.
With the media companies ndoing what large media companies do, aarrr think that torrents are very important indeed, matey
Just taught my ten year old how to.use bit torrent last week. It will live forever!
It is not anonymous and suffers network fragmentation. Yet the force of Bittorrent is its large community and mature performant tooling (compared to IPFS).
There are things like torrentio now which lend BitTorrent piracy a more integrated UX, and that has definitely extended the lifespan of its usefulness to me. Torrents rarely max out my line speed these days, mostly because I have 1000X the bandwidth compared to when I first started torrenting 20 odd years ago. But it's still one of the fastest and simplest methods to get any file you want, so I think it's relevant