Burnbit Experimental Work ◎

Burnbit began fading around 2014. Reasons include:

But its experimental legacy lives on in: burnbit experimental work

| Concept | Burnbit precursor | Modern successor | |--------|------------------|------------------| | HTTP → P2P bridge | Burnbit | WebTorrent, PeerTube | | Decentralized permanence | Zombie seed tests | Arweave, Filecoin | | Bandwidth sharing | Burnbit offloading | CSN (Content Delivery Networks with P2P), e.g., Peer5 | | Trackerless discovery | DHT mapping | Libp2p, Swarm | Burnbit began fading around 2014

By 2013, many DHT implementations added aggressive garbage collection for infohashes that returned no active peers. BurnBit experiments showed that after 30 days of no announces, an infohash would be purged from 95% of nodes. The "zombie torrent" window shrank from months to weeks. But its experimental legacy lives on in: |

tshark -i eth0 -Y "bt-dht or bt-utp" -T fields -e frame.len -e bt-peer.msg

| Experiment | File Size | Piece Size | Survival without seeds | Resurrection success | |------------|-----------|------------|------------------------|----------------------| | BurnBit-T1 | 5 MB | 512 KB | 47 days | 100% (from 1 peer) | | BurnBit-T2 | 700 MB | 4 MB | 12 days | 43% | | BurnBit-T3 | 2 GB | 16 MB | 8 days | 12% |

Conclusion from early work: Smaller files with larger piece sizes survived longer in the DHT’s "memory." The reason was counter-intuitive: Larger pieces meant fewer pieces total, which increased the probability that a random leecher had at least one complete piece.

cd /path/to/testfile/
python3 -m http.server 8080