
World’s Oldest Surviving Torrent Still Alive After 15 Years - lainon
https://torrentfreak.com/worlds-oldest-torrent-still-alive-after-15-years-180929/
======
ryukafalz
It's astounding to me that BitTorrent isn't used more often for media
distribution. There are entire industries built around distributing content
from huge datacenters, and meanwhile the economics of distributing something
through BitTorrent are exactly the opposite of how things traditionally work -
content is easier and cheaper to send the more people are interested in it!

~~~
jedberg
It’s mostly a privacy issue. For example, if Netflix used P2P, you’d be able
to track which IPs had parts of which movies and start profiling Netflix
customers. That would be bad.

The problem with P2P is that you have to make what you have public. That’s
fine for a game update where it’s all the same, but for movies there are huge
privacy implications.

~~~
laumars
The issue with using it for Netflix isn't privacy, it's that bittorrent is
simply not any good for streaming video content when compared with current
technologies already used by streaming broadcasters.

* It's slower to deliver video since you're reliant on upload connections of end users

* It's less reliable (same reason as above)

* You have no guarantee that chunks will arrive in the right order to actually stream data (ie the end of the file might download first)

* You cannot send multiple different video qualities in the same stream and have the client dynamically pick the right bitrate for their connection (this is what current streaming services do and why you often see Netflix / Prime video / etc switch between quality mid-stream without having to restart that stream. I can write more in this if people are interested)

* It's harder to debug network problems if you are experiencing issues with video quality (been in enough stressful emergency meetings with network guys over the years - I can't imagine how much worse it might have been if we couldn't do a full end to end trace of the delivery)

* Time to start playing a new stream is longer (which end users might care about)

* It couldn't support live services where the video data is being generated near real time

The current methods for video delivery are actually really good, bittorrent
would be a major step backwards. However for delivering other kinds of assets
- such as patches to computer games - protocols conceptually similar to
bittorrent are used.

~~~
tjoff
_> It's slower to deliver video since you're reliant on upload connections of
end users_

Doesn't really matter, it is fast enough. If it isn't you back it up from a
datacenter.

 _> It's less reliable (same reason as above)_

Shouldn't be any real difference in reliability.

 _> You cannot send multiple different video qualities in the same stream and
have the client dynamically pick the right bitrate for their connection (this
is what current streaming services do and why you often see Netflix / Prime
video / etc switch between quality mid-stream without having to restart that
stream. I can write more in this if people are interested)_

Sure you can. You only have to have a small map between play time and file
offset for the different streams, the client will then pick whatever it wants.

 _> You have no guarantee that chunks will arrive in the right order to
actually stream data (ie the end of the file might download first)_

The client can decide this. There are torrent clients that do this already.
Buffer 2 minutes, if some chunk is missing when 20 seconds remains pull it
from a datacenter instead.

 _> Time to start playing a new stream is longer (which end users might care
about)_

No, you start streaming from the datacenter.

 _> It couldn't support live services where the video data is being generated
near real time_

Not sure, but if a minute is acceptable delay (depends on what is being
broadcasted) it should be feasible. A live webcam for a tourist resort should
be fine, a sports event, maybe not.

Spotify even used to work this way. When a user clicked play (or seeked to a
different part of the song) the first (if I remember correctly) 15 seconds was
fetched from their CDN. After that it used its own torrent-like system to
continue and pre-fetch the next song.

~~~
laumars
> _Doesn 't really matter, it is fast enough. If it isn't you back it up from
> a datacenter._

Sorry but no it really isn't. You'd have to rely so much in your own data
centre that you'd loose the benefit of bittorrent. Plus many services will use
a commercial CDN, none of which current support bittorrent. So you'd end up
having to build your own infrastructure there, which would be a great deal
more expensive.

> _Shouldn 't be any real difference in reliability._

Home connections might drop off due to power cuts, router failure or any of
the other numerous conditions that datacenters battle against. Home
connections might get throttled by ISPs.

Where I work we offer 5 "9s" of reliability on some services, good luck asking
consumer broadband to offer the same ;)

> _The client can decide this. There are torrent clients that do this already.
> Buffer 2 minutes, if some chunk is missing when 20 seconds remains pull it
> from a datacenter instead._

2 minutes is an excessively long buffer compared to.how long most RMTP
segments are (often 15 seconds or below).

> _No, you start streaming from the datacenter._

So then why bother with bittorrent at all?

> _Not sure, but if a minute is acceptable delay (depends on what is being
> broadcasted) it should be feasible. A live webcam for a tourist resort
> should be fine, a sports event, maybe not._

A minute isn't even close to acceptable delay. Imagine if you're watching a
sports match and Twitter is ahead of your video fees, you wouldn't be grateful
for the spoilers. This is a real world problem with video streaming and why
they talk about getting the latency down to 5 seconds or less.

> _Spotify even used to work this way. When a user clicked play (or seeked to
> a different part of the song) the first (if I remember correctly) 15 seconds
> was fetched from their CDN. After that it used its own torrent-like system
> to continue and pre-fetch the next song._

Spotify is audio only. People love to compare video streaming to audio
streaming but they don't realise that HD video is an order of magnitude more
complex to stream - in terms of bandwidth, syncing, dropped frames, etc.

It's one of those problems that seems easy to solve from a superficial level
but when you start getting to the broadcaster level it's actually a great deal
more complex than even Plex and other self-hosted streaming services would
lead you to believe. (Disclaimer, I've worked at the broadcaster level)

~~~
tjoff
I just can't address this further. I'm not convinced you have the slightest
clue what bittorrent is (how on earth does not having 5 9s matter for a
consumer connection? If a node drops noone will notice).

I'm not saying there won't be problems. A major problem is the asymmetric
nature of many consumer connections. Not only is the upload often a fraction
of the download (that is the easy part), but the download speed can be greatly
sacrificed if upload is utilized. Add to that issues that home users might
want to use the connection for other stuff.

The nightmare and confusion surrounding "I can't game because someone is
watching torrent-tube" will be real and add to that issues with ISPs that have
a fixed quota or people on mobile (or tethering a mobile connection to
laptop). Netflix et al would not like to deal with that kind of FUD spreading
around.

And all this is before considering local ISP bottlenecks as it isn't what the
network was designed for. A vastly superior option is to put a proxy on the
ISP network itself (but yes, hard to do for small players).

Those alone are probably a magnitude worse than the technical issues you speak
of. Even spotify got much flak for it, and no, I don't think anyone on earth
think the bandwidth requirements of audio and HD video are similar.

~~~
laumars
I actually did cover that point (albeit at a much higher level) and of course
I know what bittorrent is. Just because I don't agree with you it doesn't mean
I don't understand the problems. Quite the opposite, I happen to work in the
video delivery industry so it's my job to understand these problems.

Like I said, it's ever so easy being an armchair critic but try deploying this
stuff at scale with SLAs covering 5 "9s" and paying customers then tell me
you've got all the kinks in bittorrent solved ;)

~~~
tjoff
Arguably, no, you contrive issues that don't make any sense. Such as
presenting the issue that the end of the file might be downloaded first. Or
that you can't have different quality versions and dynamically switch.

The end will only be downloaded if the client requests it, which won't be
unless the user is watching the credits...

~~~
laumars
The client matters though. Even just getting that client onto your end users
systems is going to be problematic. And even those bullet point aside I raised
other issues you're yet to reconcile. Plus there are other problems I'd not
considered (eg RMTP is often sent over UDP and bittorrent is not only TCP but
has additional CRC checks that you don't really want with video streaming).

But as you're clearly an expert in video delivery you should build a torrent
based video delivery platform. You could make a killing (assun. Or
alternatively you might discover these opinions you were dismissing might have
had a point and actually video delivery is a lot harder than you first
assumed.

~~~
tjoff
Client matters, yes, that hasn't even been brought up in the discussion.

Never stated I was an expert in torrent or broadcasting. But barely one who
has used bittorrent can counter most of your arguments. As I've mentioned
there are tons of issues (and as mentioned elsewhere in the thread, privacy
alone would make it a non-starter for many). I don't believe in it for large
scale, but not for the technical issues you presented.

Edit: Apologies if I came off too harsh, been a rough couple of days.

~~~
laumars
Except you only managed to disprove one point, every other counter argument
you gave I was able to offer problems with.

I honestly think privacy is the least of the problems. A bigger issue is just
getting content owners on board to begin with

Edit: sorry to read you've had a rough few days. Hope things improve soon

~~~
p1necone
They haven't explicitly 'disproved' all of your points because as mentioned
previously most of what you said is nonsense.

(Someone already mentioned this, but seriously - this has been done - it works
really well - as a polished commercial product it would probably work even
better:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Popcorn_Time](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Popcorn_Time))

~~~
laumars
I've already addressed Popcorn time several times in this discussion.

The fact that you've acknowledged that it's not as polished as a commercial
product should be a big hint that perhaps commercial products choose RMTP over
BT for a valid reason. Perhaps even for the reasons you initially dismissed as
nonsense. Perhaps you might need to read up a little more about how
professional video deployment actually works before you assuming you
understand video deployment better than all those engineers who do this shit
for a living. Just because something conceptually works it doesn't mean it's
any good when dealing with the expectations of paying customers who might want
SLAs of 99.999% uptime, low latency live services (like less than 10 seconds),
near zero buffering times etc.

The Dunning–Kruger effect is overwhelming in this thread but trust me when I
say video engineers are not stupid people and if their lives could be made
easier by using BT then we would definitely be seeing commercial uses of BT
for video deployment.

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effec...](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect)

------
berbec
I love BT and think it's great, but I always wonder:

Is it a net (for the bandwidth of whole internet) gain? I believe the major
advantage is to transfer the cost of distrubutio away from the original host
and distrubute it among those downloading IT. Does it reduce bandwidth used
appreciably or just shuffle it around?

~~~
flatline
Centralization will always be more efficient, generally speaking. Access to a
centralized channel for distribution can be prohibitive for many reasons -
cost and censorship being the foremost in my mind.

~~~
kalleboo
Theoretically BitTorrent should be more efficient, since peers nearby can send
data directly (e.g. within an ISP or regional node), whereas a central server
will always have to transfer a longer distance and involve more
infrastructure.

E.g. with my ISP, the bottleneck isn't in the last mile (that's all GPON
fiber) but rather in the national network and their transit to the internet.
If more transfer was made to local-to-local, it would reduce the amount of
traffic that needs to go cross-country or out on the internet.

~~~
bb88
I don't think that's true.

Unless bittorrent understands the topology of a network, it will never be more
efficient than a structure that takes advantage of the topology.

E.g. Netflix makes servers that can be distributed to the ISP's and can serve
content to those consumers directly from the ISP itself, and not over the
ISP's outgoing link.

E.g.#2 Multicast clients register to receive multicast streams and the routers
know how to propagate multicast.

~~~
kalleboo
> Netflix makes servers that can be distributed to the ISP's

Distributing servers to every ISP doesn't seem very efficient. It may work in
the US where I you can count the number of ISPs on one hand, but where I live
there are 100+.

> Multicast

Has multicast _ever_ worked?

~~~
opencl
IPTV services are usually based on multicast and seem to work quite
efficiently. But it's obviously useless for services like Netflix/Youtube/etc.
because you have to be sending the same content to everyone at the same time.

~~~
zzzcpan
No, multicast for IPTV is not cost efficient for ISPs. I don't think there was
ever a time when multicast was anything more than hardware vendors trying to
profit off of ISPs with broken promises of efficiency.

------
berbec
Has it really been that long since the fall (at least of major popularity) of
Napster, direct connect, Kazaa, lime wire, audio galaxy etc? I believe (please
correct me) that both Blizzard, Microsoft and many other major software firms
distrubute software using BitTorrent, in addition to all Linux distros.

------
jumelles
The torrent: [https://www.thefanimatrix.net/The-
Fanimatrix-(DivX-5.1-HQ).a...](https://www.thefanimatrix.net/The-
Fanimatrix-\(DivX-5.1-HQ\).avi.torrent)

~~~
krispbyte
> "The Fanimatrix" is a fan-made, zero-budget short film set within the Matrix
> universe, specifically shortly before the discovery of "The One" (i.e. the
> first "Matrix" feature film). It tells the story of two rebels - Dante and
> Medusa - and of their fateful mission onto the virtual reality prison world
> that is The Matrix.

------
zipwitch
A few years back, there was a story about how a _different_ Matrix fan work,
The ASCII Matrix, was the oldest torrent:
[https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/kb7wex/how-
ascii-...](https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/kb7wex/how-ascii-matrix-
survived-490-times-longer-than-the-average-torrent-bittorrent-file-sharing)

(And this all makes me feel old.)

~~~
cesarb
The funny thing is, it was in the HN comments about the source of that story
([https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10962253](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10962253))
that was revealed that the Fanimatrix torrent was still being seeded.

~~~
dEnigma
That's fascinating! I also was still under the impression that the ASCII
Matrix was the oldest surviving torrent and even started seeding it, back when
I first heard about that story. Great to see such connections being made;
that's what the internet is, or should be, all about.

------
techload
I uploaded one torrent in 2004 and it is still alive with seeders.

~~~
hk__2
> I uploaded one torrent in 2004 and it is still alive with seeders.

What do you mean by “uploading”? You seed torrents, you don’t upload them
(where?).

~~~
techload
I meant 'created' one torrent. Where? TPB.

~~~
kapad
Torrent link?

------
userbinator
It makes me wonder what the actual very first widespread torrent was (even if
it has no more seeds) --- my guess is some Linux distro.

------
petecooper
See also:

[https://torrentfreak.com/oldest-torrent-is-still-being-
share...](https://torrentfreak.com/oldest-torrent-is-still-being-shared-
after-4419-days-160124/)

Another Matrix-related torrent from yesteryear.

------
black_puppydog
> With a limited budget of just $800, of which nearly half went into a leather
> jacket

This is my favorite bit :)

------
thrownaway954
legitimate question: why not upload it to YouTube?

You can still have the torrent link in the description if people want to
download it, you will reach a wider audience and you might actually make some
money off it to fund future fan projects.

~~~
nyolfen
or, it might be arbitrarily demonetized or deleted, or have a a spurious
takedown put on it

~~~
em-bee
unlikely, it's independent work that may contain some copyrighted designs but
not anything copied directly of the original film, so the content-id won't
detect it. star trek fan films also stay on.

you just can't/shouldn't monetize it because that would motivate the owners of
the original film to stop you.

greetings, eMBee.

~~~
M2Ys4U
>unlikely, it's independent work that may contain some copyrighted designs but
not anything copied directly of the original film, so the content-id won't
detect it.

That is incredibly naive.

Content ID has been picking up things as innocuous as applause at the end of
an entirely novel recording as being copyright infringement.

~~~
em-bee
do you have a reference for that? (not that i don't believe you, but i'd like
to read that story and share it as a good example how bad this system is)

given the amount of star trek fan-films on youtube (there are thousands,
literally) spurious takedowns would be noticeable. so i don't think i am naive
here. as long as all your sound and images are original or from a creative
commons source a takedown should be unlikely. (that doesn't mean it can't
happen though)

greetings, eMBee.

~~~
M2Ys4U
> do you have a reference for that? (not that i don't believe you, but i'd
> like to read that story and share it as a good example how bad this system
> is)

Sure:
[https://twitter.com/mormolyke/status/1011637522324127745](https://twitter.com/mormolyke/status/1011637522324127745)

There's also examples like this, about a Star Wars fan film, where Warner
claimed that _silence_ infringed on their music copyright!
[https://www.wired.com/story/the-star-wars-video-that-
baffled...](https://www.wired.com/story/the-star-wars-video-that-baffled-
youtubes-copyright-cops/)

------
kwhitefoot
It had 49 seeders when I downloaded it just now.

------
gms
I feel so old.

------
vortico
The title should technically be "World's Oldest Currently-Alive Torrent Still
Alive After 15 Years". The first part is pretty much a tautology. This doesn't
mean that the first torrent created happens to still be seeded.

~~~
dang
I think it's reasonable to take that bit as implied. Making it explicit leaves
the title sounding a bit weird.

Edit: since people are continuing to comment about this, I've added the word
"surviving" above.

------
4ad
Torrents are only 15 years old?? Wow, I could have sworn they came before
that. I feel like I've been doing torrents forever.

Windows XP is older than torrents, but in my mind it feels much newer for some
reason. I wonder why.

~~~
berbec
I have a screenshot somewhere of my XP machine running DU meter & Napster to
show off my brand new, 2nd in my county, cable modem pulling 400KB/sec. I felt
like a God.

~~~
4ad
We only had dial-up, but I "borrowed" an EGPRS phone from work. 177.6 kbps (I
think) felt more than you could ever need! Making it work in Slackware Linux
was a challenge.

~~~
agumonkey
If you give this to someone today he will sue you for emotional harm.

------
mrhackerpoland
P2P is already used for hot cache fill in ISP hosted blackboxe cache servers
of services like Microsoft, Netflix, Google.

------
ezoe
It's alive because original author keep seeding the content. Nothing headline
worthy to read.

~~~
dEnigma
That's not correct, see this Hacker News comment and the reply by the creator:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10962253](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10962253)

