The BitTorrent Effect

[DreamTheater]

Bram Cohen is the creator and founder of BitTorrent who loves to play logic puzzles and solves throughout the day. We gathered together in his Bellevue, Washington house and played a board game called the Amazons. It has been only two weeks since he is playing the game and he has already mastered it. He loves the game because there is a strategy and he believes that in order to be successful you have to incorporate the correct strategies and methods whether it is a game or real life.

 

BitTorrent technology enables you to easily upload and download huge numbers of data files that is almost thousand times bigger than single MP3. Report says that the BitTorrent's traffic invoices around 1/3rd of all the data sent across the internet. BitTorrent will help users to download any episode or movie within minutes. Thus, there are more than 20 million people who have downloaded the application of BitTorrent.

 

Since there is so much of illegal traffic, the Motion Pictures Associations America has started suing those who downloads the movies in illegal ways. Bram Cohen begins his day by helping his wife in feeding the children and then sitting in front of his computer to check his PayPal account and the number of new users who downloaded the program. Cohen has always been interested in file sharing that people could benefit from it.

 

He was the part of the MojoNation project that created the distributed data haven where a user will keep the files safe from pirates who could break, encrypt and store them to millions of computers worldwide. Though this concept faded away but Bram Cohen got inspired from it. He visualized that breaking a big file into small tiny ones is a great way of swapping it online.

 

He pointed that the problem with the P2P file sharing networks is that the uploading and downloading doesn’t happen at equal speed rates. For instance, if two peers try to upload and download a movie of say 700 megs, the recipient will get it downloaded at around 1.5 megs a second whereas the sender uploads at 1/10th of the rate. This one-to-one swapping doesn’t work for big files.

 

Bram Cohen realized that breaking the big file into several tiny pieces to several users will make the task easier and faster. He outlined a protocol where a user’s computer will look around for others who have the pieces of the movie and then downloading a bundle from several of them at the same time. The files can transfer at a lightning speed. Basically the fundamental principle lies in the fact that the more popular the file is, the faster it gets downloaded.

 

BitTorrent is letting a user to download and share a file simultaneously. As soon as the user receives even a single piece of a file, his computer instantly starts offering to others. The greater the number of files you want to share the faster the torrent downloads the file. This is the ultimate solution to the classic style of P2P file sharing.