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0 pointsgeorgemcbay15y ago0 comments

By having 12 million concurrent peers on their tracker, aren't they pretty much de facto centralized even if the protocol is theoretically decentralized?

If The Pirate Bay disappears tomorrow do all of those users just switch over to another tracker? Very likely not. They'd just wait around to hear about the next Napster->Kazaa->LimeWire->Pirate Bay from their tech savvy friends, remaining mostly oblivious to the technology being used under the hood.

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trotsky15y ago· 1 in thread

The pirate bay hasn't actually run a tracker for a year now or so. BT uses a system called DHT (and maybe something else) that lets the peers handle the tracking themselves. The peers do need to boot strap off of something, but it's very minimal afaik.

Even when they did use a tracker it's probably more reasonable to think of it as a directory server more like LDAP or such. At their base even classic decentralized protocols like SMTP rely on DNS as a directory, IP on routing tables etc.

Scaevolus15y ago

While DHT is indeed decentralized, a central tracker is still preferred since it can quickly give an authoritative list of peers (rather than a probabilistic one).

Private sites tend to disable DHT anyways, since it's much harder to detect cheating without central trackers.

The important thing is that trackers are easily decentralized, since they're a per-torrent URL.

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