This is a bit like saying if Google went away that web search would go with it. Google's far and away the dominant service, but if it disappeared it'd take the universe about 4 seconds to recover and switch to another service.
> But in the sense that a new protocol emerges, not in the sense that bittorrent stops working.
I've often wondered how practical it would be to have a P2P protocol that only connects with people in one's social graph. For example, it could use someone's email, IM and facebook contacts, minus anyone they deem as untrustworthy.
If such a system existed, it would be very hard for law enforcement to break into, as they would have to infiltrate people's social networks. Of course, if law enforcement could force people to turn traitor on their freinds and entrap them, that would make it easier to roll up such networks; but it's unlikely in democratic societies that people would let the government do that.
The range of files available to be shared from one's immediate friends is going to be a lot less than what's out there on the whole internet, but if the protocol allowed requests to flow over multiple nodes, potentially a much larger set of files would be available. (Consider that everyone is no more than six handshakes from everyone else).
"""A friend-to-friend (or F2F) computer network is a type of peer-to-peer network in which users only make direct connections with people they know. Passwords or digital signatures can be used for authentication.
Many F2F networks support indirect anonymous or pseudonymous communication between users who do not know or trust one another. For example, a node in a friend-to-friend overlay can automatically forward a file (or a request for a file) anonymously between two friends, without telling either of them the other's name or IP address. These friends can in turn forward the same file (or request) to their own friends, and so on."""
"In June 2005, BitTorrent, Inc. released version 4.2.0 of the Mainline BitTorrent client. This release supported "trackerless" torrents, featuring a DHT implementation which allowed the client to use torrents that do not have a working BitTorrent tracker."
Have there been any good examples of a peer-to-peer distribution of torrent files? From what I've seen its been either the trackers or search engines indexing the trackers that distribute the torrents most effectively.
There's not really a coherent distributed system for the torrent files, but there's not really a need, the ad-hoc system works pretty well.
The real problem is tracking the active clients -- without widespread DHT trackers like TPB would have collapsed under their own weight years ago. As it is there's frequent timeouts and massive response latency. It doesn't help that the software running the trackers is almost universally awful PHP garbage.
Gnutella and other protocols seemed to be pretty good at distributed searching, couldn't you just plug one of those protocols into the BitTorrent clients for distributing the torrents?
I agree, on every private tracker there is a surplus of "seedboxes" or dedicated servers with gigabyte connections ready to keep the torrent community alive. These communities are often where the torrents found on public trackers originate. Most seedbox providers don't even not allow torrents from public trackers.
Although the average bittorrent user may be effected, a large migration, as a result of Pirate Bay shutting down, to private trackers would make it harder for the copyright owners to shut them down and track users because they are much more protected.
The nature of bittorrent and the huge communities surrounding them make it an almost impossible force to stop (outside of direct ISP intervention).
I don't understand the extra level of protection... they are again offering torrents of copyrighted material. also the value would lie in the users sharing, which means that both the normal users and the law enforcement guys will get the same privileges, just as in the case of piratebay.
Private trackers are much more protected then public in many ways:
a) Its invitation only, if users give an invitation to a leecher/bad person then they themselves get banned, this creates an incentive to screen users thoroughly. Any person could go on a public tracker and have a list of the IPs of people sharing a particular torrent
b) Finding the trackers is usually difficult
c) Private tracker admins go to great lengths to anonymize data and protect their own identities
The law enforcement guys would have to be directly involved in these communities to gain privileges and also be on the edge of technical advancements. But given the fact that there are thousands of people for each law enforcement user (maybe hundreds of thousands) its nearly impossible for them to keep up. There are many similarities to drug trafficking.
The other trackers will upgrade their hosting plans and will appreciate the extra ad cash.
Also here at least here no one downloads stuff from tPB - especially since you have great local trackers (which however require seeding) with users on the LAN you are connected to; its normal to see speeds of 3Mbit/s.
