Wikinventia — Atlas of discoveries and inventions · Digital Age

BitTorrent protocol — Bram Cohen

2001 AD · Transmission: Global
ComputingMethodNorth American

In 2001 Bram Cohen designs BitTorrent, presented at CodeCon 2002, solving Napster's fatal flaw: central index dependency. BitTorrent splits files into fragments downloaded simultaneously from multiple sources and redistributed while downloading. Its tit-for-tat incentive mechanism rewards sharing with faster downloads, creating a self-sustaining system with no central authority. At its peak, BitTorrent represented 25-35% of all internet traffic. This model of a distributed system running correctly via crypto-economic incentives is the direct conceptual bridge to Bitcoin (2008).

InstitutionIndependent — San Francisco, California
Historical regionUSA
Primary sourceCohen, B. — "Incentives Build Robustness in BitTorrent" (2003)
Secondary sourcePouwelse, J. et al. — "The Bittorrent P2P File-Sharing System" (2005)
Original languageEnglish
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