BitTorrent

The number one peer to peer file sharing protocol available around the world today it the bit torrent class of client side programs. Developed by Bram Cohen back in 2001, it was released under an open source license and now is under the control of the BitTorrent Company while still maintaining its open source licensing.

The bit torrent protocol was developed as a means to be completely decentralized from the need of a storage server to keep the files. Although the various bit torrent clients programs utilize a significant amount of the internet’s bandwidth the actual numbers are unknown but may fall within the 75% arena.

There are literally hundred of different bit torrent client applications available and in many different programming languages. Each bit torrent client program is fully capable of requesting, making and transmitting basically any type of file through the bit torrents network from one computer to another.

Basically, if you want to share a file with another computer, you put the file in a folder and tell the client program to make a bit torrent. All that this does is it makes a .torrent file which contains meta data that tells other bit torrent clients how to find that file.

These .torrent meta data files basically contains an announce section which allows other peers to be found, an information section for the file name and any other information you would like to include, as well as the information of the file itself.

In general, the bit torrent protocol is a very efficient means of sharing files with many other computers around the world in a very short period of time. Once a file has been turned into a torrent, if it becomes a popular file, it could easily be available on thousands of computers around the world with a matter of days.

Another important component of the bit torrent protocol is that although it does not reward you for seeding the file after you have downloaded it, the protocol will punish you for not sharing. This is done in ratios. The higher ratio you have, the better chances are that you will continuously make fast connections and allow you download toy complete in less time.

All in all, the bit torrent protocol along with the various client programs that are available on many different programming languages is considered to be the largest community in the world consisting of over 100 million computers connected to the network. It maintains its stature in the file sharing industry due to it efficiency and large network. The larger the network gets, the easier it is to find the file that you are looking for, while at the same time, also speeds up the time in which it takes to download that file from many other computers.

The bit torrent protocol is not going anywhere anytime soon, the more people want to use it, the bigger the network gets and the harder it will be for the network to deteriorate.

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