Re: [GNUnet-developers] Miscellaneous Ideas

[Christian Grothoff]

On Sunday 28 March 2004 12:53, Ian Clarke wrote:
> That depends on your definition of "efficiency", but for most reasonable
> definitions I can think of, I think you have it backwards.
>
> For example, with Freenet, when you publish content, you only need to
> upload the file you want to publish once (together with some check
> blocks for FEC).  With BitTorrent, you must distribute it from a central
> server, and it might be downloaded many times over from that server
> until there are enough people out there sharing the file.  In most
> cases, BitTorrent will require orders of magnitude more of the
> publisher's upstream bandwidth than Freenet would.

Right, there are many dimensions to consider here (total bandwidth, latency, 
publisher bandwidth, receiver bandwidth, CPU, memory, disk-space for the 
storage in the network, etc.).  That's why I did not add that kind of 
category to the list, the table already simplifies far too much :-).

> Personally, I don't find BitTorrent to be a particularly interesting
> technology.  It is even more centralized than Napster, offers no
> anonymity, and publishers must set up and run BitTorrent trackers for
> the entire duration of their content's availability.

I can see that BT has its uses, but especially because of the centralization 
aspects I did not even bother adding it to the comparison -- the application 
scenario is just too different.

Christian