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by grepfru_it 990 days ago
(btw my comment was/is about the DHT crawler)

You are describing a pay-to-play model. The validator is if the seeder/leech count is high. Well does DHT provide aggregate bandwidth of each torrent? If not, you can easily spin up 1000+ nodes and connect to your torrent. Tada fake popularity. If bandwidth is known, then you simply raise your costs a bit by running fake clients. There are anti-piracy groups who's entire mandate is to provide noise in the piracy ecosystem. Food for thought: bandwidth costs for this would be a rounding error for e.g. MGM, Universal, or any major content creator.

DHT does not offer any sort of reputation or comment system. Back to centralized torrenting which is why I suspect DHT crawling has not been a very popular feature

1 comments

> If not, you can easily spin up 1000+ nodes and connect to your torrent. Tada fake popularity. If bandwidth is known, then you simply raise your costs a bit by running fake clients.

Sure, but like the other commenter said, this has been possible for years, and yet public trackers aren't swamped with fake torrents. I think in all my years of using BitTorrent I've only ever found a single fake torrent, where the content was inside an encrypted RAR with no key (obviously there was no way to know it was encrypted ahead of time).

You are making my point. A decentralized system will be abused with spam and fraud. A centralized system allows you to moderate the results.