'Mutable' Torrents Proposal Makes BitTorrent More Resilient • Hacker News Board

Re: 'Mutable' Torrents Proposal Makes BitTorrent More Resilient

#11

Post by jbpetersen » Sat, Aug 13, 2016, 11:21 PM UTC

toomuchtodo wrote: post #8

nefariousoctopi wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that this is pretty much what IPFS [1] (and others I cannot remember right now) does. If I remember correctly, it builds on some of the BitTorrent ideas, but does not implement whole BitTorrent protocol. It might be interesting to integrate IPFS into standard BitTorrent clients. [1]: https://ipfs.io/ EDIT: Of course I ment IPFS in combination with IPNS (Inter-Planetary Name System)

IPFS is most definitely the long term solution, but I'm now of the opinion that in order to bridge the gap, IPFS needs to incorporate the Bittorrent protocol so you're serving IPFS from "supernodes". These nodes would abstract away Bittorrent and IPFS to the underlying data, since its SHA hashes all the way down (both entire objects, and chunks of the object). Think of how S3 can serve content either via HTTP or via…

I'm of the same opinion. It's much easier to gain mindshare by abstracting over the status quo and swapping out the innards than by starting from scratch with better tech but no existing culture around it.

Re: 'Mutable' Torrents Proposal Makes BitTorrent More Resilient

#12

Post by aftbit » Sun, Aug 14, 2016, 12:47 AM UTC

There are already a number of ways that torrents metadata could be shared more robustly, but none of them (including this one) allows the torrent sites to inject advertising and extract revenue.

Re: 'Mutable' Torrents Proposal Makes BitTorrent More Resilient

#13

Post by joshstrange » Sun, Aug 14, 2016, 7:26 AM UTC

> For torrent sites, this would be an attractive solution because they wouldn’t need to maintain a central HTTP server which implies costs and can be easily shut down. On the other hand, their mutable torrent magnet link cannot be easily shut down, does not imply maintenance costs, and cannot be easily tracked down,

This would imply that all torrent sites exist because they believe in the "cause" and have no other motive. While a small subset might the rest enjoy the ad revenue while appearing to only care about supporting p2p networks.