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!
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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
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
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
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.
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/
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).
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
“Is email still relevant in the modern era?”
Just taught my ten year old how to.use bit torrent last week. It will live forever!
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.
It is not anonymous and suffers network fragmentation. Yet the force of Bittorrent is its large community and mature performant tooling (compared to IPFS).
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.
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
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