BitTorrent's WebTorrent project explores Bitcoin and blockchain technology

Baozou Comment : BitTorrent is a network protocol program used for file sharing in peer-to-peer networks. It is also mainly used as the underlying technical support in the field of blockchain. WebTorrent, which is based on it, is a streaming client loaded on the browser and based on the real-time communication of the WebRTC network; users can directly share documents in the browser without installing software or special configuration. This article gives a brief introduction to the technology, which can help you understand it a little bit.

Translation: Annie_Xu

Bitcoin and the blockchain may be the most important tools in the decentralization of the internet, but BitTorrent’s peer-to-peer file sharing also has the potential to transform business and industries.

Bitcoin and blockchain technology use peer-to-peer protocols, and therefore often appear in BitTorrent projects.

Direct file sharing

WebTorrent is a streaming client loaded on the browser and based on the WebRTC network real-time communication; users can directly share documents in the browser without installing software or special configuration.

Feross Aboukhadijeh

"WebTorrent is like BitTorrent, but it's loaded on the browser," said Feross Aboukhadijeh, a 25-year-old WebTorrent programmer.

“So you can think of WebTorrent as being to blockchain what BitTorrent is to blockchain. The two peer-to-peer technologies are fundamentally complementary, just like WebTorrent’s Web2Web and other similar projects. For example, ZeroNet uses BitTorrent and Bitcoin to build a free, uncensored web.”

Aboukhadijeh also built a peer-to-peer content delivery network, PeerCDN, to make websites faster and more cost-effective.

PeerCDN is a next-generation peer-to-peer content delivery network based on WebRTC, which can support efficient peer-to-peer delivery of website content. It was developed by Aboukhadijeh, Abi Raja, and John Hiesey in March 2013 and sold to Yahoo in December of the same year.

Free WebTorrent

Unlike PeerCDN, WebTorrent is free and open and is licensed under the MIT license.

Aboukhadijeh said that PeerCDN and WebTorrent have different technical design goals. "The most optimized PeerCDN can achieve low latency downloads and efficient peer discovery. That means clients and website owners rely on centralized servers to convert URLs file into content hashes."

In addition, WebTorrent does not require clients to trust centralized servers. "WebTorrent can download Magenet URLs or seed files without trusting the server or any node."

Netflix Explores WebTorrent

Netflix has started to pay attention to WebTorrent.

"It's great to be demonstrating WebTorrent at Netflix headquarters," said Aboukhadijeh. "We're excited to see how WebTorrent supports peak Netflix hours or when ISPs like Comcast's uplinks are overloaded. WebTorrent will allow Comcast users to share data with each other without having to go through the network connection between Comcast and Netflix."

Nodes participate in content transmission

The official website shows that the most gratifying feature of WebTorrent is that each node provides content transmission support. Non-profit projects such as Internet Archive and Wikipedia can reduce website operating costs and bandwidth consumption by allowing visitors to provide support. Popular content can be transferred between browsers at a fast speed and low cost. Seldom accessed content is transmitted by the source server via HTTP.

And they have business use cases.

The WebTorrent website lists several applications, including colored coins, an open source protocol for developing digital assets on the blockchain, and “tokenly pockets,” which use Webtorrent metadata to issue digital tokens.

Web2Web project based on WebTorrent

Web2Web is built on WebTorrent and Bitcoin technology, which allows anyone to build an updateable and flexible website. It has low requirements on servers and domain names.

The website will not be able to display properly because it cannot control the network server or domain name. Using blockchain or seed files instead of network servers and domain names can avoid the above situation.

Open index.html in the browser and the following information will be displayed:

1. The most recent transaction containing an OP_RETURN script searches for the Bitcoin address 1DhDyqB4xgDWjZzfbYGeutqdqBhSF7tGt4. In this script, there is a hash of the webpage.html seed file.

2. Use WebTorrent to download webpage.html in the seed file and display it.

When upgrading without a server, the updated webpage.html will generate a seed file, and then add the corresponding hash to a new Bitcoin transaction sent from the address 1DhDyqB4xgDWjZzfbYGeutqdqBhSF7tGt4.

Users can register by sending a small amount of Bitcoin to a Bitcoin address.

The website shows that using Bitcoin payments can build e-commerce websites without servers. Users can build distributed web pages in the Web2Web gateway.