Editing revision 2 of Why not BitTorrent

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'''Question:'''
Why not use bittorrent al together, concentrate on building the Trust&Distribution and leave filetransfer to bittorrent. (I suspect Not-Invented-Here syndrome is an important factor but I see no reason not to use Bittorrent) /Erik

'''Answer:'''

BitTorrent is is a demand-base swarming distribution system. To receive a file with BitTorrent, you connect to the file's original owner, receive a "map file" that describes hashes of each file chunk, and try to download chunks from peer downloaders that already have them. If you have only one downloader per day (or per hour, etc.) seeking your file, you'll still end up serving the file to each one directly, chewing up your bandwidth day after day. k2b is completely sender-driven and is targetted at short-term, "zero-day" distribution. It forces a new model for sender/receiver interaction, and in doing so, it gives more precise guarantees about bandwidth usage. k2b and BitTorrent may be attacking the same problem, but they're attacking it completely different ways.

The description above isn't quite accurate. In the case of k2bitorrent, the 'serving' would be done by 'subscribers' who have already gotten the file, which is _already_ true in the current k2b model, and would also be a valid method of passing the file on, rather than the log method. My sincere suggestion: code it up with _both_ options: the log scaling method used now _and_ the bittorrent method, and see which scales better in the real world tests. For large bandwidth files, I suspect the bittorrent method might work better, assuming that _subscribing_ equals _sharing_. That is the main _flaw_ in BT: many people stop sharing right after they complete, and the seeder is left as the primary source for the file as you complain about.

''' Question 2: '''
You actually say that k2b and bittorrent are good for zero-day delivery, but  the battle is between the diffrence in p2p transfer models. Ok this is way over my head, but I said that perhaps concentrating on the ''"fun"'' part was the most intresting.. ;-)

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