What's "a lot" of seeds? If a million people download a particular file, is a lot a hundred? A thousand? The question is, why not a million seeds? (The answer to that question is "because then a million people are vulnerable; better to only have a few high-risk people stick out their necks.")
My point is only a tiny fraction of total downloaders actually stick around as persistent seeds. Maybe 1%? 0.1%? That means somewhere between 99% and 99.9% of potential swarm capacity is thrown away in order to preserve the pirates' anonymity. That's cool -- I'm not dissing bittorrent. It's truly brilliant. It's just designed for piracy. That's fine -- the best technology often is. But let's not pretend otherwise. -david PS: The one possible explanation for the Bittorrent design that doesn't implicate it in catering to pirates is it's the only design that works in an open-source, multi-implementation environment where you generally can't trust your peers: tit-for-tat is built for a paranoid world and thus can survive when that world is reality. I'm sure this design goal plays a factor. But I suspect its legal protections are a much bigger reason for its widespread adoption. Bill Mccormick wrote: > On 3/11/08, David Barrett <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: >> I agree a well-seeded torrent can be pretty quick. But the >> protocol/clients/users only seed for a very limited time, or not at all. >> The result is most torrents are poorly seeded, and thus slower than >> downloading from a well-provisioned webserver. Said another way, >> Bittorrent generally sacrifices speed in order to protect pirates. >> > > > --> I'll check that one the next time I'm downloading a smaller > torrent. I have the impression that alot of seeds are long term > persistant. But no data to back it up yet. > > Bill > _______________________________________________ > p2p-hackers mailing list > [email protected] > http://lists.zooko.com/mailman/listinfo/p2p-hackers > > _______________________________________________ p2p-hackers mailing list [email protected] http://lists.zooko.com/mailman/listinfo/p2p-hackers
