The Pirate Bay – The world’s most resilient bittorrent site

Worlds most resiliant tracking

You might have noticed all the new magnet icons everywhere?

These are “magnet links”, a link that lets you download a torrent directly in your BitTorrent client, instead of your browser. Most clients supports this (uTorrent, Vuze, rtorrent, whatever) and will get the relevant torrent data over the DHT network.

And DHT? It’s a de-centralized peer to peer network that all modern clients join by default, even if they are currently not downloading any torrents. DHT can help you find peers and metadata when you choose to start a torrent download.

(If you want to learn more about DHT this Torrentfreak article might be a good place to start)

You might also have noticed that the tracker has been down lately? And that the upload page don’t recommend trackers anymore! The development of DHT has reached a stage where a tracker is no longer needed to use a torrent. DHT (combined with PEX) is highly effective in finding peers without the need for a centralized service. If you run uTorrent you might have noticed in the tracker tab of your torrents that the [Peer Exchange] (PEX) row is often reporting a lot more peers than the trackers you might have for that torrent. These peers all came to you without the use of a central tracker service! This is what we consider to be the future. Faster and more stability for the users because there is no central point to rely upon.

Now that the decentralized system for finding peers is so well developed, TPB has decided that there is no need to run a tracker anymore, so it will remain down! It’s the end of an era, but the era is no longer up2date. We have put a server in a museum already, and now the tracking can be put there as well.

By moving to a more decentralized system of handling tracking (DHT+PEX) and distributions of torrent files (Magnet Links), BitTorrent will become less vulnerable to downtime and outages:

* With decentralized peer acquisition, there is no central tracker that can be down.
* With decentralized fetching of metadata (torrents) we don’t need to rely on a single server that stores and distributes torrent files.

(Before you tech geeks out there start complaining about the info_hash in the magnet links being in HEX (“isn’t it supposed to be in base32?”) – No! According to the BitTorrent specification it should be in HEX but the client may choose to also support the old base32 encoding. If your client doesn’t support the HEX encoding, please upgrade to the latest version of you client! If it still doesn’t work, send an email to the developers of your client and ask them to add support for it.)

This is the future. And the present.