The Pirate Bay argued that BitTorrent trackers have been made redundant by technologies such as DHT and PEX. In addition, The Pirate Bay team said that they might move away from torrents entirely and switch to offering magnet links instead.

“We’re talking to the other torrent admins on doing magnet links and DHT and PEX for all sites. Moving away from torrents and trackers totally – like pick a date and all agree ‘from this date, we’ll not support torrents anymore’,” a Pirate Bay insider told TorrentFreak at the time.

Now, two years later, that date is coming soon.

Today, The Pirate Bay made the first step towards this new future by making magnets the default download links instead of torrents. TorrentFreak was further informed that in “a month or so” the largest torrent site on the Internet will stop serving torrent files indefinitely.

The announcement is bound to lead to confusion and uncertainty among many torrent users, but in reality very little will change for the average Pirate Bay visitor. Users will still be able to download files, but these will now be started through a magnet link instead of a .torrent file.

The Pirate Bay team told TorrentFreak that one of the advantages of the transition to a “magnet site” is that it requires relatively little bandwidth to host a proxy. This is topical, since this week courts in both Finland and the Netherlands ordered local Internet providers to block the torrent site.

Perhaps even better, without the torrent files everyone can soon host a full copy of The Pirate Bay on a USB thumb drive, which may come in handy in the future.

Unlike the site’s users, existing torrent sites that scrape .torrent files from The Pirate Bay will have to make some drastic changes. If they want to continue serving .torrent files they will have to fetch them from DHT. Also, hotlinks to .torrent files will stop working and will soon redirect to The Pirate Bay’s detail page for the files in question.

One of the potential downsides of using magnets is that it could take a bit longer for downloads to start, especially if there are relatively few people sharing a file. This is because the .torrent file has to be fetched from other users instead of being downloaded directly from the site. More background on these and other technicalities can be found here.

The good news is that all mainstream BitTorrent clients support magnet links. This wasn’t the case back in 2009, but when The Pirate Bay hinted that in the future they could become a magnet-only site, all developers quickly made their clients fully compatible.

There’s no doubt that a torrent-less Pirate Bay will certainly mark the end of an era. At the moment it’s hard to predict what the impact of The Pirate Bay’s decision will be on the BitTorrent community. But torrents, however, will never disappear completely.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

The Pirate Bay boasted the title of “the world’s largest BitTorrent tracker” for half a decade, but a year ago this title no longer applied. On November 17, 2009 The Pirate Bay decided to shut down its tracker for good. According to the Pirate Bay team central trackers had become obsolete.

“Now that the decentralized system for finding peers is so well developed, The Pirate Bay has decided that there is no need to run a tracker anymore, so it will remain down! It’s the end of an era, but the era is no longer up-to-date,” the team announced.

The Pirate Bay argued that BitTorrent trackers have been made redundant by technologies such as DHT and PEX. In addition, The Pirate Bay team said that they might move away from torrents entirely and switch to offering Magnet links instead.

“We’re talking to the other torrent admins on doing magnet links and DHT and PEX for all sites. Moving away from torrents and trackers totally – like pick a date and all agree ‘from this date, we’ll not support torrents anymore’,” a Pirate Bay insider told TorrentFreak at the time.

The announcements led to confusion and uncertainty among many torrent users, but in reality very little changed for the average torrent user. The Pirate Bay’s dominant position as a tracker has been taken over by two new ones, and even after a year .torrents are still available on The Pirate Bay.

What was interesting to see, however, is the response that came from the development community and torrent site owners. Before last year most torrent clients didn’t have support for Magnet links, and those that did spent little time on making them compatible and easy to use. However, after The Pirate Bay’s call for Magnet support this quickly changed.

BitTorrent clients such as Transmission, BitComet and Ktorrent all implemented support for Magnets this year. The clients that already offered Magnet support, such as uTorrent and Vuze, didn’t sit still either and spent time optimizing their implementation.

Similarly, the operators of other torrents sites were also listening in and nearly all of the larger torrent sites that didn’t already offer Magnet links soon added them. In January, this was followed by the launch of the first ‘Magnet-only’ torrent index named TorrIndex. Clearly, the words uttered by The Pirate Bay operators had not been in vain.

As for the tracker that was shut down, aside from the sentimental value it hasn’t really been missed. OpenBitTorrent and PublicBitTorrent quickly took over and have been going strong ever since, and not without a reason.

Larger torrents with thousands of peers will work just fine without a central tracker thanks to technologies such as DHT and PEX. But the majority of torrents out there only have a handful of peers and for these files a central tracker is still an essential part of the downloading process.

The shut down of The Pirate Bay tracker last year marked the end of an era, but as it stands now BitTorrent trackers are not defunct yet.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.