IOTA Bittorrent

This article is a translation of the German IOTA Beginner’s Guide by .

IOTA Bittorrent – A P2P file sharing system

Since I cannot and do not want to translate the entire research paper, I only briefly describe below what this research paper is about. Please follow this link to get direct access to the document (PDF).

In a research paper titled “IOTA-BT: A P2P File-Sharing System Based on IOTA,” researchers Li-Yuan Hou, Tsung-Yi Tang, and Tyng-Yeu Liang of the National Kaohsiung University of Science and Technology in Taiwan describe a technically improved version of the peer-to-peer file-sharing platform BitTorrent using the IOTA Tangle.

The researchers describe BitTorrent’s shortcomings, such as the risk of a single point of failure and the threat of cyber attacks (Sybil u. Eclipse attacks). Since IOTA technology prevents Sybil or Eclipse attacks, among other things, they want to make the BitTorrent framework work on IOTA’s mainnet and thus solve these problems. The newly created P2P file sharing service offers higher security and better public availability.

The obtained test results with IOTA 1.0 (IRI nodes) show that IOTA-BT is an efficient P2P file-sharing environment with higher security because it can effectively reduce the number of unnecessary transaction requests and decoding, among others.

Finally, the research gives an outlook on IOTA 2.0 with the implementation of true decentralization, the elimination of the PoW mechanism (yet to be determined), and the introduction of smart contracts. Once the IOTA 2.0 upgrade is released, the researchers would like to expand the IOTA-BT application into a P2P file trading system using smart contracts.

Sources

https://www.mdpi.com/2079-9292/9/10/1610/pdf

Original source

https://iota-einsteiger-guide.de/iota-bittorrent.html

Last Updated on 16. February 2021