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!
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.
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.
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
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
“Is email still relevant in the modern era?”
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.
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.
I never used torrent as much as the last years
Just taught my ten year old how to.use bit torrent last week. It will live forever!
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
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.
Yeah that’s pretty ancient to me. That’s like saying XP isn’t ancient
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
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.
I just don’t trust anything written in java (i2p)
There is compatible C++ version named i2pd.
What? Yea
Verily?
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
