
'Mutable' Torrents Proposal Makes BitTorrent More Resilient - okket
https://torrentfreak.com/mutable-torrents-proposal-makes-bittorrent-resilient-160813/
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joshstrange
> 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.

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bobsgame
I have had an idea for a new type of torrent (or better yet, onion routed
torrents like Tribler) that is updatable by the original author for some time.

This would be useful, for instance, to have a torrent of a video series which
always contains the latest episode instead of creating a new torrent each
time, so the torrent would act more like subscription or RSS feed, which would
encourage seeding as well since you would need to keep the torrent active in
your client.

One major problem is malicious authors who would update a "verified" torrent
with one that contains malware. Perhaps the torrent could somehow contain user
reviews, and those reviews would be deprecated upon each update.

Does anything like this exist yet? Any other ideas on how to solve the
malicious author issue?

This seems to differ from what is being proposed, which if I am understanding
correctly is something like a link to an RSS feed which provides updates to an
archive of torrents. Could this provide similar functionality to what I
propose?

~~~
nefariousoctopi
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/](https://ipfs.io/)

EDIT: Of course I ment IPFS in combination with IPNS (Inter-Planetary Name
System)

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toomuchtodo
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 torrent for each
object. Same idea, except with a distributed announcement/hash table.

~~~
jbpetersen
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.

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niftich
A few days ago we had another discussion about the actual BEP-46 this article
is about, with some good comments:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12257065](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12257065)

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franknord23
Can torrents actually share chunks? Because otherwise when downloading a large
'mutable' torrent which is often changed slightly one couldn't use all
possible peers.

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aftbit
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.

