Communities build robustness in Bit Torrent - 7 views

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  #1 owen_davies on 25 Mar 12

   

  Van Werkhoven, B. Communities build robustness in Bit Torrent (2010) Retrieved from http://www.pds.ewi.tudelft.nl/~epema/ASCIa9/2010/Papers/Werkhoven.pdf
  
  This particular article looks at the mechanisms that the Bit Torrent sharing system has in place in order to create incentives for users to "unchoke" the torrent files that they are downloading. The article also reviews the existing incentive models that are in place, and unchoking algorithms and how the Bit Torrent clients are intended to be robust to handle strategies like this.
  
  In terms of community and cooperation in the article, it mirrors and tends to agree with Hales and Paratin and what other articles have said, which is that "Meta-data search is completely left to the users in BitTorrent and thus relies on websites to spread the torrent files and trackers to provide an entry point into the downloading swarm." This has mean the introduction of communities on these websites and because of this has seen the network split into many different independent swarms, which while some have consider it a weakness it was Hales and Patarin that "argue that it is actually a key strength of the BitTorrent system."
  As is noted in the Hales and Patarin article and also here, if the independent swarms all become one we could see the swarm turn into a majority of free riders which may collapse the community and collaborative effort that is in place with the Bit Torrent system. The introduction of clients such as BitThief and BitTyrant have made free riding an even easier task. Today still "Over 21 millions of users are still using public BitTorrent websites, such as The Pirate Bay, at any given moment" and most of the data is still provided by seeders who unlike many private communities have no incentive at all to actually do so and the article believes that "This behavior can be explained by the fact that people do not always act selfishly when they could."

   

  <div class="cArrow"> </div><div class="cContentInner">Van Werkhoven, B. Communities build robustness in Bit Torrent (2010) Retrieved from <a href="http://www.pds.ewi.tudelft.nl/~epema/ASCIa9/2010/Papers/Werkhoven.pdf" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">http://www.pds.ewi.tudelft.nl/~epema/ASCIa9/2010/Papers/Werkhoven.pdf</a> <br /> <br /> This particular article looks at the mechanisms that the Bit Torrent sharing system has in place in order to create incentives for users to "unchoke" the torrent files that they are downloading. The article also reviews the existing incentive models that are in place, and unchoking algorithms and how the Bit Torrent clients are intended to be robust to handle strategies like this. <br /> <br /> In terms of community and cooperation in the article, it mirrors and tends to agree with Hales and Paratin and what other articles have said, which is that "Meta-data search is completely left to the users in BitTorrent and thus relies on websites to spread the torrent files and trackers to provide an entry point into the downloading swarm." This has mean the introduction of communities on these websites and because of this has seen the network split into many different independent swarms, which while some have consider it a weakness it was Hales and Patarin that "argue that it is actually a key strength of the BitTorrent system." <br /> As is noted in the Hales and Patarin article and also here, if the independent swarms all become one we could see the swarm turn into a majority of free riders which may collapse the community and collaborative effort that is in place with the Bit Torrent system. The introduction of clients such as BitThief and BitTyrant have made free riding an even easier task. Today still "Over 21 millions of users are still using public BitTorrent websites, such as The Pirate Bay, at any given moment" and most of the data is still provided by seeders who unlike many private communities have no incentive at all to actually do so and the article believes that "This behavior can be explained by the fact that people do not always act selfishly when they could."</div>

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