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That's not correct. Torrent swarms and the DHT are separate. Each torrent basically forms its own small network of TCP connections to exchange data specific to that one torrent. While the DHT is a network shared by all clients that speak the protocol and it's carried over short-lived UDP query-response exchanges.



they're saying they jump between one and the other. ask DHT, then ask swarm, then ask DHT, then ask swarm.


That doesn't make sense because those are concurrent processes, not serial ones.


You have to be participating in a torrent swarm in order to bootstrap yourself into DHT at all. Bittorrent's DHT is not a network independent of torrent swarms. You need the address of a peer who is already part of the network in order to join it, and you have to get a list those addresses from somewhere.


> You have to be participating in a torrent swarm in order to bootstrap yourself into DHT at all.

This is not correct.

> Bittorrent's DHT is not a network independent of torrent swarms.

This is also wrong. People have used the DHT for non-torrent-related purposes.

> You need the address of a peer who is already part of the network in order to join it, and you have to get a list those addresses from somewhere.

And nothing dictates that that has to be obtained via the bittorrent peer protocol. https://stackoverflow.com/a/11089702/1362755


Which of these methods is not obtaining the address of a node in a swarm, or hitting a tracker for a list of nodes in a swarm?

> People have used the DHT for non-torrent-related purposes.

This is simply non-responsive. People have used a DHT overlaid on the collection of torrent swarms for non-torrent related purposes.

> And nothing dictates that that has to be obtained via the bittorrent peer protocol.

This is a silly distinction. You also don't need to join a swarm to get on the DHT if I join a swarm to get on the DHT, write down the addresses I get on a piece of paper, then email you those addresses, which you plug into your handwritten specialized client that only knows how to join the DHT.


> Which of these methods is not obtaining the address of a node in a swarm, or hitting a tracker for a list of nodes in a swarm?

The "find bootstrap nodes via a bunch of DNS records, then persist long-lived contacts locally" approach is quite common.

> People have used a DHT overlaid on the collection of torrent swarms for non-torrent related purposes.

No, the software does not involve joining any bittorrent swarms at all.


Sorry bro, the8472 is correct on all counts. Misunderstanding DHTs and BitTorrent and how they relate is very common.




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