How BitTorrent Turned Every Downloader Into a Server
Hello, I'm Maneshwar. I'm building git-lrc, a Micro AI code reviewer that runs on every commit. It is free and source-available on Github. Star git-lrc to help devs discover the project. Do give it a try and share your feedback. A couple of posts back we spent a while inside XOR distance , then used it to build Kademlia , the DHT algorithm that lets a network find anything without a directory. Kademlia: Algo That Turned XOR Distance Into a Network Athreya aka Maneshwar Athreya aka Maneshwar Athreya aka Maneshwar Follow Aug 26 Kademlia: Algo That Turned XOR Distance Into a Network # webdev # programming # beginners # algorithms 20 reactions Add Comment 6 min read I promised that algorithm shows up "under BitTorrent, IPFS, Ethereum." Today we cash that check. We're taking BitTorrent apart, piece by piece, and Kademlia is going to walk right back in through the side door. Also, fun fact before we start: a suspicious number of people on Reddit think Bram Cohen, the guy who wrote BitTorrent alone in Python in 2001, is secretly Satoshi Nakamoto. I'm not saying it's true. I'm saying that by the end of this post you'll understand why people keep saying it. The number that should not have been possible In 2004, a measurement firm called CacheLogic reported that BitTorrent alone was responsible for roughly 35% of all internet traffic. More than every other peer to peer network combined. More than the entire web. One protocol. Written by one guy. No company. No datacenter. No servers anywhere with "BitTorrent Inc" on the rack. That last part is the whole story. Every "normal" system you've ever worked on scales by throwing money at it: bigger box, more replicas, a CDN in front. BitTorrent had nobody to throw money at anything, so every hard problem, capacity, trust, scheduling, incentives, discovery, had to get solved inside the protocol itself . Problem 1: the client-server ceiling has a name Distributing a file in 2001 meant one server, one uplink, and every download eating