BitTorrent v2 • Hacker News Board

Re: BitTorrent v2

#341

Post by Talanes » Tue, Sep 08, 2020, 3:42 AM UTC

gruez wrote: post #308

TedDoesntTalk wrote: post #288

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's true that trying to buy/sell bitcoins via an exchange will subject you to AML requirements, but in-person transactions won't. Nobody does bitcoin transactions in person, at least not in America and not anyone I know. I have several bitcoins and the only way to use them is through an exchange like coinbase, who require the same identity documents that a bank does. You could argue “but you just have to find vend…

>Nobody does bitcoin transactions in person, at least not in America and not anyone I know. https://localbitcoins.com/ >You could argue “but you just have to find vendors who accept bitcoin!” But with 3 bitcoin I won’t find enough vendors to spend it on. There are also bitcoin-for-gift-card stores, which vastly expands your vendor options.

How is buying gift cards not just a more restrictive way of converting your Bitcoin to the currency on the gift card?

Re: BitTorrent v2

#342

Post by gruez » Tue, Sep 08, 2020, 3:48 AM UTC

Talanes wrote: post #341

gruez wrote: post #308

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Nobody does bitcoin transactions in person, at least not in America and not anyone I know. https://localbitcoins.com/ >You could argue “but you just have to find vendors who accept bitcoin!” But with 3 bitcoin I won’t find enough vendors to spend it on. There are also bitcoin-for-gift-card stores, which vastly expands your vendor options.

How is buying gift cards not just a more restrictive way of converting your Bitcoin to the currency on the gift card?

It is, but the restrictiveness of mostly mitigated because you can either 1) buy gift cards to stores you visit on a regular basis (eg. nearby supermarket) 2) buy gift cards only after you've decided what to buy. It's also adventurous compared to converting to cash directly because there's usually a discount on the gift card (compared to having to pay a fee for cash), and that AML regulations are laxer.

Re: BitTorrent v2

#343

Post by hysan » Tue, Sep 08, 2020, 3:49 AM UTC

gkfasdfasdf wrote: post #268

hysan wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some thought experiments for you to try: - Does this guarantee that you get the speed that you pay for? If not, then should the price during heavy congestion cost less per GB? I’ve had the unfortunate luck of having lived in areas where the internet is unusable for anything other than email and light browsing during peak hours. Bonus: Do you know why this happens? If not, I encourage you to research this. - How will…

I think the answer to most of these questions is, let the market decide. E.g. consider this: congestion during peak hours is bad now, but there is currently no penalty on an ISP for being slow. However if billing was based on bytes moved, for an ISP to underserve during times of demand means lost revenue. Thus ISPs would be incentivized to provide the best service.

With respect to the US, this answer is incomplete. The theory of letting the market decide only works when there is a free market. Most places I’ve lived has only had a single choice for ISP effectively making them monopolies.

Re: BitTorrent v2

#344

Post by fenomas » Tue, Sep 08, 2020, 3:51 AM UTC

doomrobo wrote: post #291

sbierwagen wrote: post #280

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Just imagine if this was done all the way down to the piece level. I don't know about that. With a reasonably large number of users, wouldn't you start seeing hash collisions via birthday paradox? Might be better off keeping it at the file level. (Though this does incentivize malicious users to find hash collisions of particular files they want to defend, and seeding the swarm with garbage files)

Hashes are now 256 bits. In order to get a collision with probability 1% you need to produce about 4e37 hashes. For comparison, if you had a 5GHz computer that did a SHA-256 hash every cycle and gave 100 of these computers to every human on Earth, it'd take over 300 million years to produce 4e37 hashes.

> In order to get a collision with probability 1% you need to produce about 4e37 hashes

Does "get a collision" here mean finding a particular collision with a known hash, or finding any collision between any two of the generated hashes?

Re: BitTorrent v2

#345

Post by juangacovas » Tue, Sep 08, 2020, 4:11 AM UTC

I remember World of Warcraft using the bittorrent protocol internally to distribute updates, which was an smart use at that moment considering the horde of people downloading at the same time.

Re: BitTorrent v2

#346

Post by denkmoon » Tue, Sep 08, 2020, 4:12 AM UTC

nicbou wrote: post #257

dchuk wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is exactly the problem with all cryptocurrency currently. It’s a massive user experience issue, in the sense that users have to experience the technical bullshit of how the currencies work, completely missing the brilliant part of real money: it just works. I hand people money, they give me things. I swipe my credit card, I get things. I can’t remember who aid it originally, but there’s a great test you can give…

It has been a few years, and despite a few attempts, I still don't really understand bitcoin. Yes yes ledgers and proof of work and yada yada, but I still don't know what I would need to do to buy something with bitcoin right now. As I understand I need to do something that's pretty much exactly like opening a bank account, but transactions take forever, they cost money, and the currency is not accepted by any busine…

> I still don't know what I would need to do to buy something with bitcoin right now.

but I think you do. You find a seller who is willing to accept the currency you're using, and you use whatever interface to the bitcoin network you've chosen to do "send x money to y identifier". No different to a regular EFT.

You identified the exact problems. It's not that bitcoin transfers are some weird foreign concept, it's that they take forever, have high fees and aren't accepted universally.

The major users of bitcoin as an actual currency rather than a speculative vehicle are places that can't use the more convenient forms of currency. Guaranteed they'd rather use USD if they could.

Re: BitTorrent v2

#347

Post by computerphage » Tue, Sep 08, 2020, 4:12 AM UTC

sedatk wrote: post #294

Thorentis wrote: post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This right here is the biggest new feature in my opinion, and should have been discussed in more depth in the announcement. I also think they should have pursued this avenue further before releasing v2. Content addressing is one of the big advantages of p2p applications, and IPFS has been pushing it for a long time. Just imagine if this was done all the way down to the piece level. You have two different torrents (sa…

Only if blocks have the same offset in the same binary and if they align with the block boundaries. Otherwise, different hashes would be generated. I don't expect that to happen a lot.

It will still definitely help some use cases:

> Identical files will always have the same hash and can more easily be moved from one torrent to another (when creating torrents) without having to re-hash anything.

Re: BitTorrent v2

#348

Post by janaagaard » Tue, Sep 08, 2020, 4:14 AM UTC

> All new features in BitTorrent v2 that are not backwards compatible have been carefully given new names, to allow them to coexist with the v1 counterparts.

This seems like a really cool approach that could be applied lots of other places where versioning can be tricky. But probably also hard to come up with new, good names.

Re: BitTorrent v2

#349

Post by Shared404 » Tue, Sep 08, 2020, 4:15 AM UTC

sanderjd wrote: post #267

nicbou wrote: post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It has been a few years, and despite a few attempts, I still don't really understand bitcoin. Yes yes ledgers and proof of work and yada yada, but I still don't know what I would need to do to buy something with bitcoin right now. As I understand I need to do something that's pretty much exactly like opening a bank account, but transactions take forever, they cost money, and the currency is not accepted by any busine…

It's simple: it is an abject failure as a currency. It is fairly successful as a security for the purpose of speculation. If you aren't a financial speculator, you really don't need to pay attention to it.