[tor-talk] About time to make BitTorrent work over Tor,

[Kostas Jakeliunas]

On Mon, Aug 26, 2013 at 2:46 PM, Nathan Suchy <
theusernameiwantistaken at gmail.com> wrote:

> I don't want this for piracy as I have a paid VPN account that is much
> faster for that if I decide to pirate. I think we need BitTorrent though to
> work on Tor so Tor Users can securely share files with one another.


AFAIK the most obvious issue with this (among more subtle side-channel
attack / decloaking problems) is network scalability. Total relay bandwidth
available is, while seemingly increasing in general, very limited given
such use cases. [1] How does one scale BitTorrent on top of that? It's
probably not the right way to look at it. Perhaps try delving into, for
example, GNUnet [2, 3], which is explicitly designed to be compatible with
your use cases (probably). There are bound to be interesting problems and
possible solutions there.

But perhaps there's still some discussion to be had. I'm sure this has been
discussed myriads of times, however - maybe it's worth trying to browse
through the mailing list archives.

[1]: https://metrics.torproject.org/network.html#bandwidth
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNUnet
[3]: https://gnunet.org/

--

Kostas.

0x0e5dce45 @ pgp.mit.edu