
Ask HN: What comes after BitTorrent? - sergiotapia
We use to do P2P with Limewire, directly downloading from people&#x27;s devices.<p>Next came Soulseek in popularity, directly downloading from people&#x27;s devices.<p>Then more than a decade ago, came Bittorrent where you downloaded from the swarm.<p>What comes next? Are there any next-gen systems being developed to replace bittorrent for file sharing?
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albertgoeswoof
BT is still great, and exceptionally good at distributing large, popular files
(or groups of files). Why does it need a replacement?

IPFS is probably spiritually closer to BT in terms of censorship and content
sharing, and could be a valid replacement if the right incentive based sharing
applications are built over it. Right now there is little incentive to seek
out and add content to IPFS, if that can be cracked then BT could be wiped out
by it.

However, the trend now for most people is to subscribe to spotify, netflix and
amazon prime, thinking there is an endless selection of great and original
content. Instead you quickly run out of that and end up listening to and
watching whatever the algorithm tells you to.

~~~
englishrookie
I agree that Netflix has a very limited offering. You won't find any of the
classics in there when it comes to movies. You can't really use it as a movie
library, in other words.

Spotify actually does have a very large number of songs, and I have no trouble
finding classics in many genres - as well as completely new work.

~~~
albertgoeswoof
I think the danger is in thinking that streaming providers have everything and
are incentivized to show you everything.

e.g. When you pull up an auto-generated playlist or look at recommended
suggestions, are you just looking at content which the provider prefers to
show you? Can you trust reviews from the same company that's selling you the
content? If some content isn't on there, will it just disappear into the
abyss? If the provider decides to drop some content, will you ever see it
again?

~~~
sgtmas2006
I've had Spotify show me an indie label artist with <1000 listens on Spotify,
and <1000 views on Youtube. It was the absolute best thing I've ever seen.

And yes, if content isn't on Spotify for me, it basically doesn't exist. If
it's on Bandcamp maybe I will download it.

Spotify allows you to see songs that you have added that have been removed
from availability as greyed-out names.

------
pfraze
The Beaker browser [https://beakerbrowser.com/](https://beakerbrowser.com/)

It uses a P2P protocol called Dat, which is similar to BitTorrent but supports
changes to the data and realtime streaming
[https://www.datprotocol.com/](https://www.datprotocol.com/)

It's file-sharing mixed into the Web. Beaker uses Dat as a drop-in replacement
for HTTP, which means you can browse Dat sites, create new sites within the
browser, and use Web APIs to read/write/watch files
[https://beakerbrowser.com/docs/apis/dat.html](https://beakerbrowser.com/docs/apis/dat.html)

~~~
nitrohorse
Been playing around with Beaker Browser--super cool project!

------
bhouston
So many people I know who are not at all tech savvy buy streaming boxes that
offer unlimited free channels. Those things seem to be incredibly popular.
This is what has replaced Bittorrent for movie and TV piracy for the masses,
or it just enabled piracy when before Bittorrent was just too complex for
them. It is now just streamed on demand from a large variety of pirate sites
through Kodi and friends.

The people using these generally have no clue they are pirating. It is just
this box they bought that offers great value.

This is what has replaced Bittorrent because it is immediately accessible to
the masses for $199 or whatever those boxes cost.

~~~
p1esk
What are these “streaming boxes”? I’ve never heard of Kodi either.

~~~
rrdharan
They're very popular in Canada:

[http://www.cbc.ca/news/business/piracy-iptv-services-live-
tv...](http://www.cbc.ca/news/business/piracy-iptv-services-live-tv-1.4560320)

------
CamTin
I think filesharing is mainly just going to die. Streaming is probably the
main perpetrator. Hollywood and the music industry are figuring out how to do
digital distribution in such a way that consumers don't feel the need for
filesharing.

The other is the increasing orwellization of online life, with most computer-
mediated interactions and data storage happening in one of a few silos, all of
which are cozy with the authorities.

~~~
shawn
Torrenting too. Getting all the adobe products I need for $35/mo is a perfect
fit.

~~~
larrik
Adobe pricing hurts a ton when you are a casual user, though.

~~~
newscracker
Most subscription apps or products are way too expensive for casual users
(those who don't make money from using the apps or products). It just starts
piling up and could become enormous - one subscription for this, one for that,
one for another and so on.

------
monocasa
Bittorrent is almost two eras here, regular torrent files and magnet links
with their associated DHT. Splitting off the metadata to a giant DHT, is a
huge (albeit backwards compatible) change.

I think that shows why Bittorrent might be here to stay for a while, it's
willing to make pretty deep changes to stay with the times.

------
feross
WebTorrent ([https://webtorrent.io](https://webtorrent.io)) is the first
torrent client that works in the browser.

It's written completely in JavaScript – the language of the web – and uses
WebRTC for true peer-to-peer transport. No browser plugin, extension, or
installation is required. The WebTorrent protocol works just like BitTorrent
protocol, except it uses WebRTC instead of TCP/uTP as the transport protocol.

Using open web standards, WebTorrent connects website users together to form a
distributed, decentralized browser-to-browser network for efficient file
transfer.

~~~
aepiepaey
There's no real incentive for regular BitTorrent clients to spend the
development time to add support, because the only ones with something to gain
are WebTorrent users.

Existing BitTorrent clients, on the other have something to lose:

* WebTorrent peers are less likely to be connectible (behind NAT etc.)

* WebTorrent peers are more likely to "hit and run" (by navigating away from the page, you stop seeding)

* WebTorrent peers are more likely to favor sequential downloads instead of rarest first (for in-browser playback)

Being incompatible with regular BitTorrent means it does not get any utility
from existing swarms (unless regular BitTorrent clients gain widespread
support; unlikely).

This means WebTorrent is mostly relevant for content delivery, for use cases a
site offloads bandwidth usage onto their uses (like PeerTube, for example),
and the site itself always runs a seed.

------
c2h5oh
The music and film industries mostly ;-)

But jokes aside, I don't see much need for something to replace BitTorrent as
a mean of distributing content. Gradual improvements sure, something
completely new not really.

Where big changes are going to be needed is content discovery - as big torrent
search sites disappear it's becoming more apparent they and not the trackers
are the weak point.

------
popman
The two things I don't see bittorrent utilized for nowadays are livestreaming,
and file matching. Sure, there's some demos of bittorrent live, but it's not
hit the mainstream yet. 30-60 second stream delay should be plenty of time to
sync video to everybody. File matching would be neat too. Just scan your files
against a DHT database and you'll never have to worry about losing them again.
Just as long as there's seeds.

------
gr3yh47
There's usenet, and importantly another layer, plex. the future is some people
downloading everything and all their friends using their plex

------
xemoka
Along the same lines as IPFS—and having some similar goals [0]—is the DAT
project and related protocols.

[0]:
[https://github.com/datproject/docs/blob/master/docs/faq.md#h...](https://github.com/datproject/docs/blob/master/docs/faq.md#how-
is-dat-different-than-ipfs)

------
sktrdie
I honestly think that the idea of letting people search inside a torrent
before fully downloading it has been overlooked and might be the next big step
in P2P file-sharing: [https://github.com/lmatteis/torrent-
net](https://github.com/lmatteis/torrent-net)

The idea is that you can actually query stuff inside a torrent; like actually
perform an SQL query and only the pieces relevant to the query will be
downloaded.

This sort of allows for distributed querying if you think about it, since your
query could be satisfied by many different peers that are seeding/leeching.

Imagine a Web built this way. Where sites are served by people that visit them
and are not just static sites, but fully queryable as you'd expect in the
normal HTTP web.

I wrote more on this here: [https://medium.com/@lmatteis/torrentnet-
bd4f6dab15e4](https://medium.com/@lmatteis/torrentnet-bd4f6dab15e4)

------
eb0la
I bet the next Big stuff is Enterprise P2P.

Some content providers are using P2P to complement their CDNs with more offnet
capilarity (cannot tell details in public).

Others like Alibaba are using P2P to syncronize content among servers. Thing
of it as a faster and simpler way to have server farm contents un sync.

What I'm missing yet is using P2P for configuration, and backup.

~~~
kosli
@eb0la is probably right. The trends and challenges in the Enterprise favor
p2p solutions to solve several different problem vectors.

The first is Scale. Ever greater scale in terms of data, number of endpoints,
workflows, locations… you name it. Moore’s law means more computers doing more
things at every point in the Enterprise, but especially at the edge. Scaling
enterprise systems will be one of the great challenges over the next decade
and not just for the web monsters. Everyone will need to contend with scale.
The good news is nothing scales like P2P. It’s organic. When every client is
also a server, greater scale simply means even more supply and faster speeds.
It’s the reason 20 engineers at bittorrent could build software that moves
whole percentage points of total Internet traffic (link to recent exabyte blog
post?), traffic volume ten or twenty times the size of even the largest
websites with thousands of employees and large infrastructure and operating
budgets.

The second is Reliability. Making workflows reliable is quite expensive with
traditional architectures. Building in redundancy for high availability can be
very expensive and grossly inefficient in the client-server model. Conversely,
P2P is naturally resilient and reliable when there are many potential sources
for the data. If one is not available, no problem, pick among the thousands of
alternatives. P2P is resilient while remaining efficient in resource
utilization.

Finally, as mentioned above, there is a growing need to operate at the edge of
the network, where resources are spread over a wide area and potentially over
low-quality networks. If the experts are right, there will soon be 10 times
the data volume at the edge as in the cloud. (see gartner). Managing workflows
at the edge of the network will require a centrally managed P2P solution (like
Resilio) utilizing a combination of technologies to solve all of the above.

Managing Enterprise workflows reliably and at scale, in the cloud or on the
edge, favors a p2p solution and you already see it in various IoT, container
orchestration and edge computing architectures. Expect to see more.

------
fyi1183
There's torrent via I2P, which provides a different anonymity-vs-performance
tradeoff compared to normal BitTorrent.

I would say that BitTorrent just fits is particular design constraints fairly
well, so I don't see anything replacing it without changing the use case
patterns.

------
danmg
People are always trying out new protocol features and enhancements. Clients
ship with the ones that have turned out to be the most useful.

In other words, BitTorrent will be the next BitTorrent.

Compare modern clients that can easily handle seeding tens of thousands of
files across hundreds of different trackers with minimal resource utilization
with the reference client people used back in the early 2000s. You only had
one way to connect to trackers and other clients, the traffic was trivial to
detect and filter, and the client only support one file at a time along with
using 100% of a cpu.

------
izzydata
Implement the thing they are attempting to make the in the comedy TV series
Silicon Valley and have a torrent style decentralized internet. Except use
computers as well as phones.

------
alex_duf
To each network their pros and cons, I think if you look at it from a pirating
point of view, torrents seems to tick all the technical boxes.

If you talk about it in terms of corporate use / pirating fads / user
experience etc. I don't know At this point the success is not technical
anymore and will depend on the network effect (pun non intended).

------
bhouston
The problem with Bittorrent is that it is not good at lots of individual small
files. This is where Google Drive and Dropbox excel (mostly.)

~~~
HelloNurse
When there are lots of small files, you usually want all of them, something
that a torrent guarantees and file by file downloads do not.

I'm aware that both Google Drive and Dropbox can create zip archives of whole
folders, but who guarantees that the content hasn't been deleted or replaced?
Integrity is more important than convenience.

------
sebazzz
If it comes to prevention of piracy, I think a lot of torrent sites go
underground, behind login or on Tor network.

------
amelius
What comes next? It must be Netflix, given the decrease in BitTorrent seeders
over the last decade or so.

~~~
newscracker
I may have some anecdotal data to back this claim that BitTorrent seeders have
decreased in the last decade (or more like the last half a decade), but there
are plenty of seeders on hundreds, if not thousands, of private sites and
trackers. I don't think that has decreased a lot. Maybe someone who has
studied this better to state how things have changed.

------
y4mi
IPFS comes to mind.

But I doubt anything will displace BitTorrent anytime soon. It's quiet
entranched at this point

------
eof
Seems like IPFS potentially?

------
tacostakohashi
IPFS looks very hopeful.

The documentation is very light on for now though. There are some large
organizations that use NFS or AFS in large networks, IPFS looks like a
promising replacement, but I think they would need more documentation and
stability before considering a switch.

------
raldi
Netflix, HBO, Amazon, and Apple providing music and video at a reasonable
price, high quality, and easy to use, while respecting their customers in a
way the RIAA and MPAA never did

------
megaman22
Online payment is so much easier, and incredibly more accepted than it was
during the wild Napster/Limewire/Torrent days. Companies are finally figuring
out that if they just make things available, people will pay for it, too.

Network speeds have increased sufficiently that keeping vast local libraries
of content the way we used to makes less sense than streaming; I get speeds
from Netflix or Amazon comparable or better than I used to get over USB from
external hard disks.

~~~
kyriakos
unfortunately companies are still far behind with availability. evident from
comparing netflix catalog from different countries. additionally a lot of
older more obscure content sometimes can only be found via non legal methods.
this is unfortunate but true.

