[jondumbau]

i'm pretty sure the most popular torrent in the DHT doesnt have 644 downloads in the last week.

this must be measuring downloads/hits from btdigg.org (only), so someone is linking directly to it and relying on them to jump clients into the DHT perhaps?

[lcrs]

I can't imagine btdigg can scrape the whole DHT, but I think the idea is that the traffic they see by running many "fake" nodes is proportional to the whole, because the DHT spreads all traffic around fairly equally? I'm presuming they're using a method similar to the one presented here: https://www.usenix.org/legacy/event/woot10/tech/full_papers/...