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BitTorrent Protocol Turns 15(!) Today

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OneEightZero

OneEightZero

aka ThreeOneFour
70GFyFe.jpg


Torrent Freak - BitTorrent Protocol Turns 15 Years Old Today

“My new app, BitTorrent, is now in working order, check it out here,” Bram Cohen wrote on a Yahoo! message board on July 2, 2001.

It was the first time a working copy of the BitTorrent code had been made available to the public, but the initial response wasn’t exactly overwhelming.

“What’s BitTorrent, Bram?” was the sole reply he received on the board.

Fast forward 15 years and BitTorrent has become one of the most prominent technologies of the current millennium. One that transformed the web and which is still hugely relevant today.

When Cohen first announced his invention to the world, he could have never imagined that the technology would be used by hundreds of millions of people in the years that followed.

He was simply trying to improve file transfers, by using people’s upload and download capacity simultaneously.

“Fundamentally, I was trying to figure out how people on the Internet could utilize all the unused upstream bandwidth to make it faster to send huge files,” Bram Cohen told TorrentFreak, commenting on these early days.
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While the technology itself was the main focus for Cohen, the public quickly realized that BitTorrent opened the door to sharing huge files, which was very rare at the time.

Since BitTorrent users download and upload at the same time, popular files are distributed more quickly. With other file-sharing technologies, distribution slows down.

This idea was a major breakthrough at the time. Before then, it was virtually impossible for a regular Internet user to share a video with dozens of people, but torrents made it possible. As a result, BitTorrent soon became responsible for a quarter of all Internet traffic.
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Put it in the list of things you didn't think were so old. ^_^

What have been/are your experiences with BitTorrent?
 
G

GreatestHits

Member
Hell yeah. The government is still pissed

And a fair bit scared

Congratulations, to the fuckin' pirates and the free software license creators
 
L

la_briola

Member
CreepingFear said:
You wouldn't download a car, would you?
Click to expand...
Well... why not?

"Roughly 75% of the LM3D is printed. Our goal is to consolidate as much of the traditional bill of materials into a single, 3D-printed piece as possible, eventually making about 90% of the car using 3D-printing. Nearly all of the body panels and chassis are 3D printed on the LM3D."
 
G

greycolumbus

The success of others absolutely infuriates me.
la_briola said:
Well... why not?

"Roughly 75% of the LM3D is printed. Our goal is to consolidate as much of the traditional bill of materials into a single, 3D-printed piece as possible, eventually making about 90% of the car using 3D-printing. Nearly all of the body panels and chassis are 3D printed on the LM3D."
Click to expand...

These are truly great times.
 
S

sinxtanx

Member
now if only console game updates could start using bittorrent...if I could opt in to make my PS4/Xbone/WiiU seed game files, I would do it for the good of the network
 
J

janoDX

Member
Well bittorrent helped me a lot with discovering some good games when I didn't had any money about 10 years ago.
 
G

Geist-

Member
Wow, I didn't realize it was so young, I started using it for various things in 2004. At the time I thought it was old tech, just one of those things that had been around since the start of the internet.
 
F

FyreWulff

Member
I legit used it to grab Linux ISOs, although Getright and it's feature that let you download from multiple mirrors at once was still way faster than that.

As a protocol it's kind of weird since technically it's awesome but most consumer routers choke to death on it from all the connections it opens.
 
Grizzlyjin

Grizzlyjin

Supersonic, idiotic, disconnecting, not respecting, who would really ever wanna go and top that
YaGaMi said:
It was huge for me when I used to download anime upon its release.
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Same. That was the entire reason I started using bittorrent, for fan subbed anime. That must have been around 2002 or 2003ish, because I was watching stuff like Naruto.

Is there a reason consoles don't use torrents? Even if it was something you had to opt into, I would be down for it. The servers getting hammered every Tuesday when games come out is so tiresome. Someone smart explain why they can't do it haha
 
Mistake

Mistake

Member
lazygecko said:
I don't even know what the client of choice is these days. uTorrent looks like it has gotten really shady.
Click to expand...
I still use utorrent 3.2.3, which is roughly right before they inserted code to use you as a bitcoin machine. Still works fine. No ads (disabled) and a simple interface
 
A

Accoun

Member
sinxtanx said:
now if only console game updates could start using bittorrent...if I could opt in to make my PS4/Xbone/WiiU seed game files, I would do it for the good of the network
Click to expand...

Didn't MGS4 (or some other game?) use it for updates? Or at least some different p2p protocol. There was a choice between standard download and p2p download.
 
S

Somnid

Member
Webtorrent is going to make it all seems so quaint. No more clients, just download peer-to-peer downloads straight in the browser.
 
T

thebeeks

Banned
Yeah, that sounds about right. 2003-ish is when I got HUUUUUGE into downloading fansubs.

Accoun said:
Didn't MGS4 (or some other game?) use it for updates? Or at least some different p2p protocol. There was a choice between standard download and p2p download.
Click to expand...

I think Blizzard used/uses it for giant WoW patches.
 
A

Accoun

Member
thebeeks said:
I think Blizzard used/uses it for giant WoW patches.
Click to expand...

Blizzard games in general, I think (you could even extract the .torrent file from the launcher IIRC) - but the question was specifically about console games. Wonder if Blizz is doing it on there.
 
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