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BitTorrent Turns 10
ktetch-pirate writes "On this day, 10 years ago, Bram Cohen released the first bittorrent client to the public. Most P2P protocols have had a rapid rise and then a drop-off as the subsequent 'best thing' has come out, but after 10 years, nothing has bested bittorrent, and it still remains king of the P2P castle. Just when will it be replaced?"
Bit torrent can do large or small files with equal ease. It's just the distributed method of seeding really shines with large files.
Nowadays there is such thing as "trackerless torrents". No idea how it works, but it works.
It uses a technique known as a Kademlia Distributed Hash Table (DHT). It's a rather tricky algorithm, which turns out to work beautifully for this particular application.
--jch
You are correct - seeding torrents is like a P2P pyramid scheme and the people on the bottom are left holding the bag.
The thing is, this situation is a rare occurrence for most users, and most will be able to seed greater than 1 most of the time. In my experience, the number of torrents you can comfortably seed greater than 1 dwarfs those that you can't. While I have found torrents on private trackers to be typically very well seeded, often to the point of saturation, I've never had a problem maintaining a positive ratio and I usually don't seed more than a day or two.
It's more than a couple countries in Europe. I live in a small town in Romania, for years already we have fiber to the door and 1 Mbps down on torrents with no throttling. Of course, when I go to Finland several times a year for work, things get even better, but even the European backwoods is better than what you get in most US metropolitan areas.