[danpalmer]

I don't think this project changes any of this? Torrents have been around for decades and this hasn't been a problem yet. We can't rule it out entirely but it does seem unlikely at this point to be worthwhile doing otherwise we'd see more exploitation.

If the criticism is that a DHT crawler is going to be more subject to this than a website where people submit upload torrents, that may be the case, but I think the author of this project underestimates the DHT crawling going on. I believe the torrent ecosystem is largely automated and there's little in the way of manual submission or human review going on.

[Retr0id]

The "problem" is that most users aren't crawling the DHT to find torrents, right now. The more people start using DHT crawlers as their primary way of finding new torrents, the more incentive there is to spam the DHT with junk, malware, etc. (because there will be more eyeballs on it)

That is, the usefulness of DHT crawling is inversely proportional to how many people are doing it.

[danpalmer]

But my second point is that I really think they are crawling the DHT, albeit indirectly. There are many torrent websites and they tend to have the same content. It seems fairly clear to me that this is what most torrent sites are doing. Maybe not the major names that users might submit to, but the long tail of other torrent search indexes certainly. It also seems to be what Popcorn Time does.