[na85]

>The whole point of something like BitTorrent is that it is distributed

Yep that's true, but I'm so sick of projects that shoehorn everything into BitTorrent. The simple fact is that a lot of us don't have epic bandwidth, and BitTorrent is really poorly behaved in terms of how greedily it will saturate your connection.

It's the reason I don't want to run e.g. a Tor node or a CJDNS router.

Call me cheap, but I pay for my bandwidth and I don't want to have to deal with slow video streaming or high ping times just so someone I've never met can buy their drugs on silkroad.

[XorNot]

Which is where everyone seems to forgetting that Facebook, Google - all these services. They're not free. Nothing is.

You get a lot of service storage and availability wise from Facebook and Google and the like, and you pay for it by being not anonymous. The fact that so-called anonymous social network services never get any traction is because when you get down to it, no one wants to pay the costs for Facebook level service directly.

[Amadou]

Call me cheap, but I pay for my bandwidth and I don't want to have to deal with slow video streaming or high ping times just so someone I've never met can buy their drugs on silkroad.

A key thing to remember is that each person's social network is relatively small. You don't have to relay traffic for someone you've never met, just for the people you've added as "friends" plus some relatively small amount of overhead for linking into the rest of the "world" in order to do searches for people you want to add as "friends."

[DerpDerpDerp]

You spending your bandwidth so he can buy his drugs safely is the cost of you being able to communicate without people knowing to whom and when.

If you don't think the price is worth it, don't do it. But there's no way to avoid that trade.