When you enter a URL and hit enter, your computer reaches out to a server someplace in the world to access a website. Sometimes a site is stored on a few servers for redundancy or load balancing, but the model is functionally the same. BitTorrent, the company behind the popular file sharing protocol, is looking to change the way websites are hosted by keeping the data not on a centralized server, but on the home computers of users. These sites would be split up into pieces just like a file shared via a torrent. BitTorrent calls this system Project Maelstrom, and it’s getting very close to reality.
Project Maelstrom is built on a modified version of Chromium, the open source project that backs Google’s Chrome browser. If we extend the file sharing analogy to Project Maelstrom, the modified browser is basically your torrent client. You enter a web address, and the browser connects to a “swarm” of users already accessing the site who have pieces of it ready to send over. These bits are assembled into the final product and displayed normally. If it works as intended, you won’t notice a difference in the functionality of these sites.
The torrent browser is going to be able to access regular web pages via the internet, but it’s mainly for these so-called torrent web pages. One of the main advantages here will be scalability that surpasses anything we have today on traditional server infrastructure. When a site gets hit by a lot of traffic, a server has to devote more and more bandwidth to serving content, which can easily saturate the pipes. In the case of a distributed denial of service attack (DDoS), a website can be knocked offline for hours or days. A torrent web page should actually become more reliable as it is accessed more. More seeds means more speed and accessibility.
BitTorrent-Maelstrom
One notable drawback to Project Maelstrom would be the relative difficulty in keeping very new or unpopular sites online. When a new torrent web page is created, there is only one source for the data, probably with nowhere near the power of a dedicated web server. So the creator is the first seed, the next person to visit is the second seed, but the third person then has two sources to download from, then becoming the third seed. It’s just like a torrent — it can get stupid-fast when there are enough seeds. The decentralized nature of Project Maelstrom would also make it nearly impossible to take down a website as long as users kept seeding it. Seems like a perfect match for The Pirate Bay, right?
This platform would present ethical issues, of course. What if a legitimately terrible or illegal site were hosted in Maelstrom? There might not be any way to take it down. This is something law enforcement already deals with on Tor, but Project Maelstrom has the potential to be much faster and easier to use. Still, BitTorrent thinks content providers will get on board with Maelstrom as a way to reduce costs.
For example, if Netflix can detect when a user is connecting through a Maelstrom-enabled browser, it could save money by serving video content through a swarm of multiple users, rather than pushing separate streams out to everyone individually. It would be like a content delivery network on steroids. BitTorrent is going to find out if Maelstrom will be used for good or evil soon. A consumer version is expected this year.
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