Is P2P dead? (Zeropaid Poll)

**moneoa** · October 30th, 2009, 05:25 PM

A recently posting older member brought up a good point of discussion

Originally Posted by kippies

maybe P2P is just getting old

:scratchchin:

I dont know- Ive kids from 16 down to 2 and P2P is not part of their vocabulary much-

mostly paid access on demand and subscriptions to sites are what they talk about. Its too much hassle to learn to circumvent DRM..find a cracked version etc... man im getting old LOL

Maybe we won the battle and lost the war ?

discuss

todays topic, the decline of P2P and is it dead for good?
Share your thoughts and if you know of some interesting new P2P tech please share as it has been years since anything aside from BT was looked at.

Exeem was the last new thing to come out but it flopped big time

**Signa** · October 30th, 2009, 05:52 PM

I still consider Bittorrent clients to be peer2peer, so no. Though we are missing some of the advantages that programs like iMesh, Morpheus, Kazaa, and many others, sharing files with thousands of other people is better than ever, because no one can troll you into downloading fakes and viruses as often. Most places that allow you to download a torrent allow users to comment on it. If the file is bad, comments will say so, and then the torrent will die.

**Drew Wilson** · October 30th, 2009, 06:12 PM

Well, think of it this way, YouTube appeared just shortly after BitTorrent spread like wildfire.

If you want to be hip on the latest P2P thing, try one-click hosting. It's a movement that's newer than BitTorrent, but BitTorrent users tend to snub it in part because of a superiority complex some have for being on a top site.

Added to this, with countries moving more towards being copyright industry lap dogs, I can see we'll have a rise in the popularity of anon and encrypted services. I think that's where the newest trend will most likely emerge.

If you're totally into being a hardcore traditional p2p user, outside of Newsgroups, there's less activity in terms of the hype. Back in the day, it was a huge new thing to go to Napster and download the software, use the client to find music via search and download pretty much anything on a nice open network. It carried through on Kazaa, Morpheus, Limewire, Grokster, Bearshare, WinMX and tonnes of others, but the p2p landscape has since changed dramatically.

Now, it's more of a quasi-darknet and server based system where you get in on invite only systems, then you can find the content you are looking for or simply searching Google for any file-hosting company and finding the content you are looking for.

If you want to look at this in the purest sense, yes, p2p is pretty much a shadow of it's former self 4 years or so ago. It still exists and there's still a userbase for it, but it's pretty much old news by todays standards. eMule is a great client. The Kademlia network is a fantastic improvement. Still, the focus of P2P hasn't really been there since then I'm finding. The old advise still remains true that if you can't find it on eMule, you can't find it anywhere, but most people already know this and are more interested in different developments saddly.

Look at the whole P2P landscape from a more liberal standpoint and you'll notice that the p2p landscape has simply changed. Methods are changing, things are in the works and it stands to change again in the near future pending the changing political landscape on the subject of copyright.

In terms of population, the p2p population has pretty much remained steady. Actual p2p traffic is declining mainly because of YouTube and one-click hosting as the traffic isn't really classified as p2p traffic in the traditional sense. Only reason it's remained steady is because it's a norm and has been a cultural norm for a few years now.

You could even say that p2p is just normal or simply the new status quo. Someone gets a high speed internet connection and one of the first things they do with it is use it for p2p (after email and web browsing).

It's a mixed blessing for writers that there's such a huge political aspect to p2p because there really wouldn't be much to write about otherwise. As a bonus, p2p is so integrated with everything else now, it's opened up other major avenues of reporting including network neutrality, DRM, and privacy. The reason that it's a mixed blessing is because now there's a hypothetical risk of actually reporting on the issues. I've personally, throughout my entire career, have actually recieved things from general hate mail to legal threats from medium and large figureheads before over the years whether directly or indirectly. Most often, it's simply a case of a copyright maximalist being pissed off that I would have a differing opinion though.

Still, while there's a sort of edge to being a writer or even a file-sharer in general, the side affect of being culturally acceptable is now there isn't that edge there use to be in general. Before, it's like, "OMG!!! You mean movies are on the internet now???". Now, it's like, "Yeah? Who doesn't file-share?"

So ultimately, I'd say p2p is far from dead. Actually, it's, in a way, a victim of it's own success. But it is all a matter of perspective.

**carpefile** · October 30th, 2009, 07:56 PM

P2P may not be dead, but it's stagnant as hell. Bittorrent has seen to that.
Piracy on the other hand is alive and well. Instead of any real innovation, DDL has made a major resurgence (yes, believe it or not kids, direct downloads was the preferred method years ago, you didn't invent it).
With the onset of countless one click hosts coupled with multiupload sites, you can now get 8 different pieces of a movie from eight different filehosts and rejoin them in a single folder.
No more waiting for time or size limits, even with freebie accounts.

**Tic3** · October 30th, 2009, 08:02 PM

I don't think P2P is dead, but I do believe development of new protocols has stagnated since BitTorrent came along.

Very little seems to be happening in the development arena.

**w31n3r** · October 31st, 2009, 01:35 AM

its definitely dying. in the past year i've let many, actually all but one of my private BT sites get pruned off due to inactivity. and these were top sites, to absolutely die for too. pity i don't miss them. and i'm not the only one either.

we're stuck at bit torrent, and it's started to get boring. how many torrent newbs have you seen lately? not just here but on other sites as well? if new users aren't added, eventually it'll die off. thats a pretty basic rule for the survivability of all things.

i agree with kippies, kids these days have much more money than we had, they can buy their own downloads, besides the myspace generation is too wrapped up in themselves to bother learning how to cover up their asses. anonymity is against the grain of current events.

**evilmegaman** · November 1st, 2009, 10:13 PM

Originally Posted by carpefile

P2P may not be dead, but it's stagnant as hell. Bittorrent has seen to that.
Piracy on the other hand is alive and well. Instead of any real innovation, DDL has made a major resurgence (yes, believe it or not kids, direct downloads was the preferred method years ago, you didn't invent it).
With the onset of countless one click hosts coupled with multiupload sites, you can now get 8 different pieces of a movie from eight different filehosts and rejoin them in a single folder.
No more waiting for time or size limits, even with freebie accounts.

I am going insane trying to remember what P2P client it was that used like DDL but it was like a network... I remember it had some controversial adware at some point or something.

Jeeze, what was this 5 years ago? Sad :(

**mountain_rage** · November 1st, 2009, 10:59 PM

Originally Posted by evilmegaman

I am going insane trying to remember what P2P client it was that used like DDL but it was like a network... I remember it had some controversial adware at some point or something.

Jeeze, what was this 5 years ago? Sad :(

Let me see, Earth Station 5, Limewire, Imesh, Bearshare, Morpheus there were others, but those were the main ones I remember with spyware adware or some controversy surrounding it.

All that kind of became an non issue when opensource P2P took over. Personally I'd like to see filesharing move away from torrents and back to a Gnutella style network. So much more convenient than all these private sites, all we need is encryption. It would be nice if internet was fast enough for Mute or Ants to be viable, and worth improving. Although it does seem anonymous networks are very popular among researchers, so there are a lot of smart people putting in many hours to achieve something phenomenal. Thanks in large part to copyright legislation, censorship laws, etc.

**Drew Wilson** · November 2nd, 2009, 01:47 AM

Anonimous p2p seems to be more of an Asian thing right now. Once western governments start implementing chinese style censorship, we'll probably wind up using a program similar to this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perfect_Dark_(P2P)

**moneoa** · November 2nd, 2009, 09:48 AM

I think by definition P2P IS quite dead.
Remember that true p2p means to distribute as much as you are provided and with bittorrent 99.9 percent of the people downloading are leechers who will disconnect from the swarm.

True p2p of the likes of the Original Kazaa and Morpheus and Napster are gone for good in so far as I can see.

It's a shame things are not as innocent and easy as they were when you could open a client and search for an item and have millions of peers sharing the file with you

**RACKnRAIL** · November 2nd, 2009, 10:49 AM

Originally Posted by moneoa

It's a shame things are not as innocent and easy as they were when you could open a client and search for an item and have millions of peers sharing the file with you

I know what you mean. I loved AudioGalaxy and Napster both for that very reason. Much of my music collection was downloaded back then.

**Drew Wilson** · November 2nd, 2009, 01:39 PM

Originally Posted by moneoa

I think by definition P2P IS quite dead.
Remember that true p2p means to distribute as much as you are provided and with bittorrent 99.9 percent of the people downloading are leechers who will disconnect from the swarm.

True p2p of the likes of the Original Kazaa and Morpheus and Napster are gone for good in so far as I can see.

It's a shame things are not as innocent and easy as they were when you could open a client and search for an item and have millions of peers sharing the file with you

I happen to think that Limewire and eMule are still used a fair amount though. I happen to use eMule and most of the fundamentals of p2p exist in those two clients. Not as popular and the development is slower (if you discount the development of the eMule mods) So I both agree and disagree.