When bittorrent was released, I saw the technological aspects as groundbreaking, thinking it would be repurposed for much more than ISO downloads and mass media distribution. How did the technology not become a more popular way of distributing via crowdsourcing large community datasets, such as openstreetmaps, or something like distribution of Android rom updates, when the costs of distribution are so expensive?
A lot of stuff uses bittorrent for file transfers behind the scenes these days.
What does Steam use? Gotta be a torrent for games and dlc.
I know it can do something similar if another machine on your network has the same games installed, but I don’t know if they use bittorrent for the main system or even that network sharing dealie.
It’s something i wonder about sometimes, but never care enough to look up.
At some point bit torrent WAS an essential distribution tool. It represented nearly 70% of internet traffic!
So I think you’re asking the wrong question…
Before Youtube allowed long video uploads and before video Podcasts were a thing, I remember some early tech creators were creating long form videos around 2004-2005 and they would distribute episodes via BitTorrent, since it was most cost effective for them.
Still works well as a concept for PeerTube…
For nerdy nerds like us a torrent client isn’t anything complicated. Regulating up and downstream bandwidth to personal preference isn’t complicated. Managing torrents to seed and not isn’t complicated. For your Average Joe though…
Plus, Average Joe doesn’t have port forwarding set up to punch a P2P hole thru his IPv4 NAT router
Pretty sure its being used in the backend by lots of huge things. I remember something about meta/facebook using it for server side stuff. I reckon many companies that have to distribute big updates use it as well like game companies. Its just not being used to liberate users but used to lighten the load on commercial infrastructure.
Valve hired the creator of Bittorrent to write Steam.
He’s a fascinating guy that has worked on a bunch of projects I wish I was smart and productive enough to have worked on
Hey just a heads up, you added an extra “to become” in your title. Anyway great question, I’ve always wondered this, hopefully someone knows better.
Perhaps the growth of everyone placing files on clouds these days may be contribute to its inpopularity, or simply because the name just got lumped together with copyright infringement.
Yeah, it didn’t help that politicians tried to make p2p protocols illegal because they didn’t want or didn’t care to understand the difference.
Hey just a heads up, inpopularity starts with a ‘u’.
Thanks and yes I’m comfortable with English as my first language. I was trying to post my comment with respect for OP. A QWERTY keyboard has the U and I together, my phone keyboard sucks for sure.
Totally off topic, but I read a classic author’s murder mystery as a kid, Doyle or Agatha or whoever, and a clue was a mistyped B for N, because they’re together on the keyboard. For 40 years I’ve been noting such errors. “Ah! OP meant to type ‘U’.” :)
I think that the idea of an app “stealing” bandwidth from its users because they want to save money on their own servers is a pretty bad look. Our current world is still not that great w/r/t internet quality, price, and availability, and it was surely worse in the past. It could definitely be more of a thing in the future, but maybe only for stuff used by techy people who could understand it and give proper consent.
I mean, the core idea of the technology - that a single monolithic file can be broken up into a torrent of smaller packets and losing the connection won’t mean that you lose your progress towards downloading the big file - doesn’t require that you also act as a seeder. Personally, I’m fairly sure Steam uses something like this behind the scenes, as their delivery system, because you can interrupt it and it will continue once you resume.
because you can interrupt it and it will continue once you resume.
I’m not debating whether Steam is doing p2p or not, but HTTP absolutely supports continuing partial download.
Are you implying that BitTorrent can only be used secretly by apps?
I’m implying that most normal people would not give their consent to it, or would be coerced by the app into giving consent when they don’t understand what it means (e.g. Windows Delivery Optimization).
The costs of distribution aren’t really that expensive for big companies.
You can’t really trust that users are going to be willing to donate hard drive space and upload bandwidth to help your maps service or whatever work. (Though, to be fair, you did mention things like OpenStreetMap which is probably more likely for users to be willing to support that way.)
Bittorrent isn’t something you can seamlessly integrate into browser-based apps.
But also, there are newer technologes based on a very Bittorrent-like P2P way of doing things. IPFS is basically reskinned Bittorrent. And Peertube uses in-browser P2P to distribute videos. I don’t think there’s any standard in, say, HTML5 that allows for P2P without some hacks, but it sounds like there’s a good chance such a standard is likely to make its way into browsers in the relatively near future. Also, it sounds like Chrome supports more than Firefox in that area right now.
Bittorrent isn’t something you can seamlessly integrate into browser-based apps.
That’s only because we don’t have the file compression technology yet.
We do have webtorrent.io at least
Is that middle out compression?
Phones and tablets? They’ve displaced computers for a fair few people, and it’s hard to consistently run a P2P client on those devices (And that’s ignoring metered connection costs)
You still need to seed and once the thing has been distributed, odds are good the clients will disconnect among the normies. Bittorrent only really works if everyone contributes space and bandwidth because you’re really joining a community and curating data. And not everyone is nerdy or tech savvy enough to do that which means products aren’t really going to be built around it.
I think it, or derrivative methods are used more than you think, but aren’t talked about because torrenting has a bad rep.
I believe windows update and World of Warcraft either do or did use p2p downloads for updates
The costs of distribution aren’t so expensive for anything but the largest amounts of data (video)
You can grab a digital ocean server droplet for $6 per month that allows a Terabyte of transfer. That’s 0.6 cents per GB, and includes the compute to actually be able to serve that data as well as the transfer amount.
