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What is currently the most seeded torrent in the world?

Is it even possible to accurately determine the most connected torrent ?

I suppose if you had access to every ISP's network and could filter out the protocol bittorrent uses. Maybe that's a little unrealistic and too low-level.

Every tracker could be queried, counting the seeds for each torrent, eventually resulting in the highest count unique to a specific torrent.

Any tracker that has a significant amount of users that would sway the count weighting would be included in the query.

Oddly enough a program BitChe allows for multiple tracker / search engines for a specific textual inquiry. However there is no "popular torrents" section.

"Popular Torrents this Week", like at (https://1337x.to/home/) is not the same or a complete metric. Every tracker / search engine with a significant volume of monthly traffic would need to be included, and the count metric would have to be a difference accumulated monthly. Accuracy would improve over time.

A good list is at (https://blokt.com/guides/best-torrent-sites) showing the traffic volume (in millions) of multiple popular torrent trackers / search engines.

Has anyone developed this already by any chance?

What is currently the most seeded torrent in the world? Should we know this? A definitive list of the most popular torrents to date.

J. Tully
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  • A list of websites isn't really interesting to the P2P nature of torrents. Some trackers do allow a "scrape", so you could find the most popular torrent among those. That said, it'd be an infohash. If you found out `x` is the most shared infohash, what do you hope to do with that information? – Anon Coward Dec 02 '20 at 01:44
  • Am I the only one that thinks that infohash would be valuable? – J. Tully Dec 05 '20 at 05:28
  • To clarify I meant a list of torrents, not websites. – J. Tully Dec 05 '20 at 05:28
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    I’m voting to close this question because it is not programming related. – SuperStormer Aug 29 '21 at 01:18

1 Answers1

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Is it even possible to accurately determine the most connected torrent ?

Accurately? No. Bittorrent is a protocol, it can be deployed in private networks. E.g. if large cloud providers happened to use bittorrent internally and we don't know about it then they might happen to be operating the largest swarm in the world and any outside observer would miss that.

If we limit ourselves to torrents traversing the public internet then perhaps if you had access to several internet exchanges and could passively sniff traffic... Since most of bittorrent is unencrypted it would be possible to gather statistics that way. There is no other way to globally observe torrents marked as private since they only communicate with their specific trackers which in turn may not publish their statistics to unauthenticated users.

If you restrict yourself to the subset of non-private torrents on the open internet seeded through clients with DHT peer discovery enabled then it gets easier. You can first build a database of torrents via active infohash sampling and passively observing get_peers lookups coming your way. Since popular torrents should create a lot of traffic you're likely to learn about those infohashes fairly soon this way. Then perform DHT scrapes to get the seed count for each torrent and perhaps connect to the Top-100 torrents gathered that way and perform peer exchanges to validate the DHT scrapes.

the8472
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  • the DHT option is interesting. unfortunate that bit torrent does not have these kinds of statistics built into the protocol, a sort of torrent of all torrents if you will. – J. Tully Oct 25 '21 at 16:54