Hello everyone,
I recently came across an article on TorrentFreak about the BitTorrent protocol and found myself wondering if it has remained relevant in today’s digital landscape. Given the rapid advancements in technology, I was curious to know if BitTorrent has been surpassed by a more efficient protocol, or if it continues to hold its ground (like I2P?).
Thank you for your insights!
BitTorrent has a new version now BitTorrent v2 you will see this in BitTorrent clients that support it like qBitTorrent in ways like info hash v2 its still getting better v1 and v2 are not inoperable because some of the changes can not work together but you can create hybrid torrents that can work in both. https://www.libtorrent.org/features-ref.html#bittorrent-v2 https://blog.libtorrent.org/2020/09/bittorrent-v2/
“Is email still relevant in the modern era?”
I never used torrent as much as the last years
This seems like a dumb question, BitTorrent absolutely is still relevant and probably the most popular method of file sharing in the scene. Foss groups use it too for distributing ISO files for Operating systems, and it might even be used as the video hosting provider in future Fediverse YouTube alternatives (I’ve heard talk of a video hosting platform on Fedi which uses activitypub for everything else but hosts videos via BitTorrent) pretty cool stuff.
So yeah BitTorrent is still relevant, and it makes sense since if it isn’t broken why fix it? Not to say that it couldn’t be better, the biggest problem with it is the anonymity issue, but until someone makes something better BitTorrent will continue to be popular, and the ideal choice for decentralized file sharing, especially in the piracy scene.
Almost always I find torrenting the most convenient method to download anything. When someone puts some file up for download and that person uses one of those stupid free file hosters, I usually get annoyed by “disable ad blocker”, slow dl speeds, etc.
A torrent makes things so much more convenient.
The article you linked answers most of your questions.
- Relative global upstream traffic went down, but not due to other file-sharing protocols but entirely different applications
- I2P is not mentioned anywhere in the article, nor any other sharing alternative
- VPN is mentioned as a potential reason for not being able to identify torrent traffic; VPN has become much more prevalent and promoted in the scene
- The article says, in piracy, streaming websites are much more popular now
It has not been surpassed by another protocol. The relative numbers don’t say much about absolute numbers or usage.
And 10 % of global internet upload is certainly no irrelevancy.
