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How Does BitTorrent Work? a Plain English Guide

Autumn on September 02, 2019

No talk about downloading things on BitTorrent. Or the best clients to do so. Just a deep-dive into the technical side of it. Anyone can read thi...
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Cristian Baluta

I'm wondering if people still pirate things now that we have all this paying services. I know that i tried to get photoshop from filelist (which was supposed to be the best) and waited few months. Or if i tried new movies they were all fake. I find the technology good for large file transfers, wetransfer could implement this in their client, instead wasting space on the server it would be nice to send only a link to my local file.

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Dmitrii Baranov

You just need to know where to takes those things, as simple as that. And quite often it's much more easier to pirate it comparing to the legal ways. E.g. I'm living outside the US, hence I don't have 100% of movies on Netflix, more than half of them is simply not available in my country due to copyrights and other legal bs. At the same time I have to pay the same amount of money as Americans do, but get much smaller library. Sounds unfair to me. That's why I use Popcorn Time which is the same Netflix, but free and with no limits.

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Okoye Chikeluba Paul

Depends on where you are from and which search engine you are using. Many countries and ISPs block piracy sites and it is rather difficult to find them with a Google search as Google also blocks them and websites that link to them.

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Anirudh Ramesh

Thank you very much for the detailed writeup @brandonskerritt . I have a question/doubt if you have the time to answer.

Suppose there are a large number of nodes in the network (all of which are can be your peers - and let us assume the best-case scenario - none of them are malicious). Let us say I have a mediocre (or very bad even) upload speed.

I see only two cases in which I can download from other peers and where I am not snubbed- (where I can be co-operated with)

  1. Peers have connected with me and are yet to discover better peers (and how they find better peer is through Optimistic Unchoking).
  2. I am the peer with whom some other peer is testing their waters (with Optimistic Unchoking).

In every other case, I'm going to be snubbed, aren't I?

How can I expect my download to ever get completed this way? Please tell me if I got something wrong here as well :)

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Nicola Erario

Ok, it’s a detailed article; simple BitTorrent. A good point to discuss can be imho: how we can implement this nice technology today, apart from the “downloading large files” ?

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Claudio

The gaming industry should start adopting the bittorrent protocol as games are becoming mostly digital downloads and are growing in size with every new release (we talk about 50GB as the standard size)

Networks like the PS4 are horribly slow also for this reason. They are not scaled enough to support the requests and that's why it takes ages to download an update even if it's a few hundred megabytes.

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Anastasios

Facebook have used in the past BitTorrent (not sure if they still using it) for deploying they backend.

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Joshua Fox

I loved this article, thanks!

There is a problem with "Most websites with lists of torrents" also the paragraph below it needs to be removed, looks like an editing mistake.

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Santiago Torres

Great article! I've always wondered about BT protocol.
Where can I learn more about writing comm protocols?

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Luke Floden

"🥊 BitTorrent vs Cient-Server Downloading"