Topic: BitCoinTorrentz.com - Torrent Download Service - page 5. (Read 57198 times)

any word on how soon it will be back up?

that would be cool but I have no idea if/how it could be done.

you could use one or several automated escrows, though (escrow and exchange would be quite similar in this case)

You could trust (wot?) the person offering the name to send it to you in return for the amount.

interesting idea.

I don't know about namecoin transactions at all, but is it possible to "offer" a nmc domain name for sale "within" the nmc blockchain/network somehow? I'm thinking something like: make a transaction that transfers ownership of a domain name that has a payment tx going along with it that can be filled by anyone as long as the amount is above a certain value and the recipient address isn't changed? Like smart property?

create a thousand namecoin names: b/bitcointorrentz_000 - ..._999

trade like a pro on otc or whereever - decentralized

send dividends to every name/stock in nmc

I'm also wondering what happens to our shares what with all that GLBSE/nefario clusterfucking going on.

what sort of direct download speeds are people getting with their downloads? I would be using this service in bulk but for the slow DL speed I get. I often see the torrent hitting several MB/s while watching the progress, but i can't seem to get more than 190KB/s from the direct download. is this about the same as everyone else?

The service has just stopped at 100% for me multiple times.  It refuses to show me the files after payment.

21/09/12: Update-> Hardware Failures & Bonus Bandwidth

To all of the users and supporters of BitCoinTorrentz..

Please accept our apologies for the inconvenience caused by the issues affecting service availability over the past 10 days or so. On this occasion the downtime was quite significant as it was a result of a critical hardware failure in the datacentre. Extensive repairs had to be carried out, and they have finally been completed.

I have always tried my best to keep downtime to a minimum, but the service is still in a very experimental state. Unlike the bitcoin network that has no single point of failure, BitCoinTorrentz has several. Like our primary server suffering a catastrophic failure such as this.

I can only ask that you try to remain patient while efforts to improve the reliability of the service are ongoing. It is not an easy task to be the sole person responsible for ensuring smooth and continual operation of a resource intensive web-service, with dependency on several third-party software clients and their API's that often get bloated and sluggish when being run for extended periods of time.

We have been operating for close to a year, and for the majority of time our uptime statistics have been within acceptable limits. There have been occasional hiccups, but we have met all of our service obligations without fail, excepting occasional delays caused by real life responsibilities that are my primary concern. But the most important statistic is the fact that the service is still in operation after almost 1 year and it is being used regularly, by an ever growing userbase.

I have decided to give something back to all our loyal users as a token of appreciation for your continued support and as an early 1st birthday celebration. Every registered member with at least 1GB total usage has been credited with at least 2GB of bandwidth, absolutely free! The more bandwidth you have used on your account since you registered, the more bonus credit you will have received, up to a max of 10GB for power users with >100GB total usage.

So, please enjoy your next few downloads with compliments from BitCoinTorrentz!

- The Team

22/09/12: Update-> Service Development and the Future

Dear users,

Since BitCoinTorrentz.com is almost a year old, I thought I would post a quick update about the direction that I think this service should move in going forward.

I started this project as an avid bitcoin enthusiast and self-taught web developer primarily as a hobby in my spare time. Nobody wants to see this project grow and flourish as much as I do, which is why it so frustrating when I realise that I cannot dedicate all my time to it. However, I am determined to keep this service alive with the eventual goal of developing it into a fully automated service that requires no manual administrative inputs.

To ensure that scaling-up will not be a problem as volume increases, more robust automation of the administrative and maintenance tasks has become an imperative development goal because I am acutely aware of the fact that I don't have the capacity to do it reliably myself. The most frequent task that needs to be carried out manually at present relates to issues with downloads that hang mid-download or fail to start due to a lack of seeders or poor availability. Currently the bandwidth is deducted from your balance regardless of whether the torrent finishes or not. In my assessment, doing it any other way is a potential target for abuse of the service. The downside though is that when it goes wrong it has to be fixed manually in a fairly tedious way. It's a difficult task to automate for both technical, practical and security reasons.

Download hanging can happen for several reasons, some of which is avoidable: you might have selected a torrent with no seeds in which case it will not start; or a torrent with availability <1 causing the download to stop at <100%. More rarely, the download process can hang because of a sever-side API timeout if the bitcoin client or the torrent client stops responding. On even more rare occasions the clients can crash altogether, leaving the service non operational until the programs are manually restarted. Another infrequent problem is if you downloaded the same torrent as someone else has it can cause conflicts in the database or on the filesystem and the results can be unpredictable.

Things don't always go to plan in the swarm, and because of technical limitations of controlling complex clients with fairly limited API's, it is difficult to keep everything ticking over in a reliable way. The server often has very high RAM, CPU and I/O load because of all the cryptographic computation involved with bitcoin and the torrent client itself is also a resource hog and can at times have multiple transfers in progress simultaneously. It's API is also very active because of the volume of ajax job status requests, as is the webserver serving out http downloads to. Another chokepoint is the use of third party torrent meta-info databases for magnet-link functionality and their slow and sometimes unreliable services.

Some of this is not within the control of either myself or the end user, but to minimise these problems until a solution has been put in place please ensure you select torrents that are well seeded. We can not offer any guarantee of refunding the bandwidth should it fail to complete, so any torrent you load into the client is ultimately done so at your own risk. During the day I do not have access to an externally networked computer and while I do try to respond to these requests, sometimes I get to it but more often than not I don't.

My plan for the future is to continue development at a pace that is compatible with my life and job with the ultimate goal of providing a service that is fast, affordable, reliable, robustly automated, has a fluid user experience and remains free of extraneous features and elements such as advertising.

Admittedly, there is still some way to go before these goals have been achieved, but BitCoinTorrentz is here to stay for the long term. Provided our users continue to have a need for a service such as this, BitCoinTorrentz will do it's best to continue meeting that need. I am supremely confidant that not only will we achieve our development goals at a steady pace over time, but with an ever expanding bitcoin economy and rising adoption rates of this novel technology, I am confidant that we will continue to develop and grow with the relentless onward march of innovation.

- The Team

Back up!

For dealing with multiple files, there is a neat Firefox extension called "Down Them All" which will download all the links on a page.