Hello everyone,
I recently came across an article on TorrentFreak about the BitTorrent protocol and found myself wondering if it has remained relevant in today’s digital landscape. Given the rapid advancements in technology, I was curious to know if BitTorrent has been surpassed by a more efficient protocol, or if it continues to hold its ground (like I2P?).
Thank you for your insights!
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.
Snappy uses torrents to share Windows drivers.
“Is email still relevant in the modern era?”
I never used torrent as much as the last years
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.
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?
I mean I primarily use Usenet to find anything I want.
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.
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/
When I want to pirate, torrenting is my go to. I don’t do it very often, so I’m not really up-to-date on more modern methods. For some movies, I know there are those websites like 123movies or whatever. And I’ve used those. But Idek what additional methods there are anymore.
That said, I’ve tried torrenting over I2P, but it’s just slow. Not necessarily super slow, but obviously slower than doing it over the clearweb with a commercial VPN. Additionally it seems like there’s less available content with torrenting over I2P. At least in the little experience I’ve had with it.
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
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 doubt it. I think they were still using vacuum tubes in the modern era.
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.
Thanks for explaining. I don’t use it.
Good to know
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
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 and each torrent was its own separate window with no pause option.
Haha yes! 20 little BitTorrent windows ticking along
Yeah that’s pretty ancient to me. That’s like saying XP isn’t ancient
I2P is not an alternative to bittorrent, but to IP networks. Essentially I2P is an overlay over the IP-based Internet.
bittorrent can work through I2P just like it can over IP or Tor.
Thank you for this clarification
wow, this has blown up!
some additional clarification:
I2P is not universally supported by any bittorrent clients, because a bittorrent client needs specific knowledge about how to connect to the I2P network through an I2P router (by using the “SAM” protocol).
the java based biglybt bittortent client has pretty good support as I hear, it supports I2P-specific DHT and Peer Exchange. DHT is used for peer discovery without a tracker, Peer Exchange is another tech that helps with finding more peers.qbittorrent (and a few others that use the libtorrent programming library) has got support for I2P around a year ago, but its experimental so far I think, or at least it hasn’t been tested that much.
these bt clients don’t (yet) support DHT and PeX for I2P torrents. the functionality is missing from libtorrent and its single dev is very busy already.if you are interested about the technical aspects, here are some more words about using bittorrent with I2P from a developer perspective: https://geti2p.net/en/docs/applications/bittorrent
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
