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A comment on The Mission to Decentralize the Internet. Parent comment

Re:The Mission to Decentralize the Internet by 21echoes on Tuesday December 17, 2013 @02:00PM (#6923033)
> Bittorrent does not work great, to my mind, compared to a centralized service. It's absolutely abysmal on network traffic, is inherently slow, and depending on the communication, practically unusable outside affinity groups. Toward that last end it's useful, but i'd hardly consider it great in general.

I don't know what BitTorrent you're using, but most everything i torrent downloads way faster than it would from a centralized server (iTunes, MegaUpload, etc.)

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Re:The Mission to Decentralize the Internet by peterwwillis on Tuesday December 17, 2013 @02:36PM (#6923342)
You're missing out on newsgroup and fxp speeds (in the gigabits-per-second range). And that applies to every download, not just the odd torrent with as many seeders as leechers.
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Re:The Mission to Decentralize the Internet by wmf on Tuesday December 17, 2013 @09:03PM (#6925430)
It's not hard for a system with strictly more resources (e.g. massive servers) to be faster, but who's paying for it and how much more does it cost? I suspect if those massive servers acted as BitTorrent permaseeds the result would be even faster because the peers could contribute additional bandwidth.
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