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by vertere 1865 days ago
Bittorrent also has a DHT, which you can use instead of (or as well as) tracking servers.

Perhaps the key difference is that torrents (targets for magnet links) can't link to other torrents, at least not in a way the protocol is aware of. Each torrent swarm is something of an island. IPFS is more like one big graph ("web") of documents/files.
1 comments
brendyn 1865 days ago
bittorrent v2 is a bit different and more similar to IPFS: https://blog.libtorrent.org/2020/09/bittorrent-v2/
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vertere 1865 days ago
I'm not super familiar with v2 but from what I have read it's not clear how it achieves the same thing as IPFS. Yes, the file-hashing is deterministic, which can allow deduplication across torrents, but it doesn't seem to facilitate either discovery or addressing at the file level. Trackers/DHT and magnet links still only use the info hash (torrent level) as far as I can tell.

IPFS puts file/object hashes in the DHT so they are directly discoverable, meaning people coming to the same object from different from different places can find one another. It also allows one object to be explicitly addressed via an ancestor object's hash (<hash>/path/to/object), which has various benefits.

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Avamander 1864 days ago
> which has various benefits.

But also the downside of being incompatible with the BitTorrent network and it's myriad of seeders and torrents.

I think quite a few P2P projects have thrown out compatibility for the sake of some functionality but also the entire baby. PeerTube did the same, disabled WebTorrent support by-default before any BitTorrent clients got WT support. The desire to "move fast" makes people forget what actually makes a system usable and how decades of inertia changes how changes can be made. Impatience.

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