Can Autonomi behave like a BitTorrent seeder?

Beginners
1

Rather than downloading a file from Autonomi, could Autonomi seed a file? In this way, Autonomi would act like any other peer in BitTorrent, except it would never stop seeding.

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2

Anything uploaded to the network is forever “seeded”. It will always be available as long as there are nodes connected to the network.

When you download a file from Autonomi, you are downloading it from nodes that store that particular file.

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I know all that. I’d like Autonomi to work WITH BitTorrent rather than replace it. BitTorrent has a speed advantage, where the more popular a file, the more it will be seeded. As far as I know, Autonomi is indifferent to the popularity of a file.

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It’s an interesting idea. Maybe this is a kind of “layer 2” system for Autonomi. Perhaps future client software could not only do what it does now, but optionally participate in file distribution to accelerate it.

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5

I believe this is NOT the case.
@neo etc can explain this better than me but we were long told that the more popular a particular file is, the faster it can be downloaded. - the exact opposite of the internet right now

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Have not heard that logic being implemented yet?

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7

It was at least 5-6 years ago - admittedly a lot has changed since then.
I’d search for “cached downloads” in all forum posts.

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This could be implemented in various ways, the simplest would be a gateway - basically a seedbox that uses Autonomi instead of its own hdd.

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I haven’t read through this yet, but if you can use HTTP for seeding, you can use AntTP to access seed files stored on Autonomi over HTTP.

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10

Although the network isn’t optimised for this yet, immutable data is highly cacheable. This allows nodes to cache popular data closer to the clients.

Indeed, this is also needed longer term as a DoS protection, where the broader network helps to disperse the load of serving popular files.

But sure, hybrid technologies have advantages too. Certainly no harm in combining bittorrent with autonomi.

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11

The gateway would be a bottleneck then I think. It would have to download every file it seeds, and it could go offline.

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There could be many of them. Anybody with enough bandwidth can run such gateway, they just need to know the autonomi-torrent chunk mapping.

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13

At this time it is mostly correct.

But once caching is implemented there will be a lot of nodes supplying the chunk if it is popular.

It would end up being a very bad seeder as files drop off BT network and your Autonomi seeder would be claiming all these computers have the file while they have not for who knows how long.

While I am sure there will be attempts to do this, the issue is outdated seeds.

Also if Autonomi is a choke point for popular files then also will become a choke point for seeding, just not as quick. And when caching is fully implemented then the choke point disappears. Caching of chunks (immutable records) is a simple concept and would use similar methods to replication. The nodes used to help find the closest node to a chunk then also grabs a copy for caching and removes cached records according to some caching algorithm which determines when its not useful to hold it.

So not too hard to implement really, just not needed at this time and the development/testing effort is going towards getting the basics working efficiently.

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14

I was thinking loosely about this concept yesterday.

My thoughts were that some kind of Bittorrent based layer for Autonomi might be able to:

  1. Enable specific public data to be seeded by anyone who wants to support / boost availability of it, and improve download bandwidth for specific popular data.

  2. Enable immediate access to data in the process of being uploaded (while uploads are slow, maybe via some pointer to the torrent).

  3. Assist in uploading very large files by spreading the load between many collaborating nodes, if coordinating this would be somehow possible.

  4. Re-upload valued seeded data if it were ever lost from the Autonomi Network (which of course hopefully will never happen, but extra certainty may be helpful as trust is being built in early years of the network).

Funny coincidence that I was thinking about this and then the thread popped up :slight_smile:

Not sure if these things would be easy to implement, ideally as an optional layer that doesn’t need any changes to Autonomi, but hopefully some people who know more about how bittorrent works, and how Autonomi works could consider it.

Maybe a nice project for Impossible Futures if it could be useful / helpful.

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15

It’ll be interesting to see over time if there’s any real benefit to something outside of and in addition to the network itself like this. @neo’s post articulates a pretty high bar. It’s basically, if it’s good to do, it’s better to do in the nodes (network) directly.

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At this time…

Lots will change- if it gets the chance to and we don’t stop pandering to the whales…

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Yeah. Trying things out externally may be better for experimentation, as it doesn’t have any risk of unintentionally breaking / degrading anything in the network, and doesn’t depend on core devs for implementation.

Then, if something clearly adds utility, it could be considered to be added into nodes carefully in due course.

I like the idea of an EVM L2 for Autonomi to add ‘native’ smart contracts & bridging to Autonomi, but that’s a pretty big project.

A basic Bittorrent ‘L2’ should be far easier to implement than EVM, but if uploads improve significantly and caching is enabled, I’m not sure it’d add much value. Until that happens though, it might be helpful.

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