Bitfetch - Anonymous Remote Torrent Downloading

[Scrat Acorns]

Impressive, very slick interface! One bit of feedback: It would be great to have a QR code below the deposit address. Makes it easier to use it in combination with smartphone wallets (using the website on a desktop, but paying with a phone).

Thank you for your feedback. QR codes will be included in the next update.

[ThickAsThieves]

Site is broken?

[Scrat Acorns]

Site is broken?

It's just search that is broken at the moment since I'm relying on a 3rd party service for that.

Everything else should work (and has been working for a while).

[Scrat Acorns]

Pushed a big update today that added the following features:

• File selection - you can choose which files to download by clicking on the yellow file icon. You can only do that once and while the torrent is at less than 50%.
• Desktop notifications for Chrome and Safari 6
• Automatic browser downloads - some browsers will require fiddling with settings to autoaccept downloads
• More info - you can hover on the "i" button to get more information such as upload speed or availability
• Tons of bug fixes and improvements

[Anduck]

I tested this service and thought on making a small review.

Site looks cool and everything works flawlessly. Big +++ comes from the security and anonymity part.
I tested the service with a Linux Mint download and it was überfast - you can't really download it any faster. I think that the price of this service is priced alright, too.

So, if you got some restrictions on torrent downloads and need to download - for example, linux distro -, I recommend this service.

[ThickAsThieves]

Great site.

[Scrat Acorns]

Cost per GB has been reduced to 0.005 BTC.

A couple of additional changes:

• Torrents over 10 GB in size are now deleted after 10 days - or manually if you so choose
• You can hover over the 'x' button to see when a torrent will be deleted

[TheButterZone]

I wonder what ISPs are throttling. It doesn't seem like Cox does, they just forward the copyright violation "lawyers'" emails to all the addresses on your account.

Maybe some people are being throttled and they don't realize it, and would use Bitfetch if they knew.

[Scrat Acorns]

I wonder what ISPs are throttling. It doesn't seem like Cox does, they just forward the copyright violation "lawyers'" emails to all the addresses on your account.

Maybe some people are being throttled and they don't realize it, and would use Bitfetch if they knew.

Here are some popular ISPs that are throttling

USA: Comcast, Time Warner, AT&T
UK: BT, Virgin Media
Germany: DT
France: SFR

Full list

[bullioner]

Any chance of a way to choose to keep for longer than 10 days?  Often go away for two weeks and a torrent may complete downloading while I'm away, and / or I don't have time to fully download it.

[bullioner]

If a torrent stalls at 75% and will never complete, is that just bad luck and the customer needs to accept they've lost a bit of bitcoin?

[Scrat Acorns]

Any chance of a way to choose to keep for longer than 10 days?  Often go away for two weeks and a torrent may complete downloading while I'm away, and / or I don't have time to fully download it.

If you need a torrent to stay up longer drop me an email and I'll remove it's expiration date. I'm open to suggestions here.

If a torrent stalls at 75% and will never complete, is that just bad luck and the customer needs to accept they've lost a bit of bitcoin?

Certainly not. Email me and I'll refund it. I'll probably change the refund to work on all incomplete torrents.


User experience means a lot to me, so if you're dissatisfied with my service in any way email me (or post in this thread) and I'll do my best to make it right.

[bullioner]

User experience means a lot to me, so if you're dissatisfied with my service in any way email me (or post in this thread) and I'll do my best to make it right.

Great.  I've spent quite a few Bitcoins on it so far, and overall I'm satisfied.  It's a good service.  Thanks for the responses to the points I raised.

A couple of other nice-to-have things related to the zip functionality.  One is that on zipping a file, I changed my mind and wanted to download the files individually, but there wasn't a way to do this.  Another is that zip as an archive format has the index at the end, so there's no way with standard tools to access files in a partially downloaded zip while it's still downloading.  If you offered tar as well, then, due to its streamy nature, customers would be able to access files in the tar file so far in their partially downloaded tar file.

[Scrat Acorns]

One is that on zipping a file, I changed my mind and wanted to download the files individually, but there wasn't a way to do this.

I guess I could add a cancel button which would kill the zip process, but this such a rare use case. It doesn't help that zipping is painfully slow and the reason for that is that I've limited it to 30 MB/s so that it doesn't hog down the entire server.

Another is that zip as an archive format has the index at the end, so there's no way with standard tools to access files in a partially downloaded zip while it's still downloading.  If you offered tar as well, then, due to its streamy nature, customers would be able to access files in the tar file so far in their partially downloaded tar file.

This is a great idea. What other archive/compression formats keep their file list in the beginning and allow opening of partial files?

[Scrat Acorns]

Answers to emails I get a lot:

Connectivity & upload
The server is on a gigabit connection so your torrent will be downloaded at the highest possible speed. Each torrent has a 8 MB/s upload allowance with 20 upload slots. Slow or stalled torrents are the result of low or nonexistent amount of seeds.

Slow downloads from the US
This applies to browser downloads only. As a cost-cutting measure some US ISPs (Comcast, Verizon) will limit the throughput of transatlantic TCP connections. To get around this you can use a multithreaded download manager such as DownThemAll.

Ratio
Ratio is not guaranteed to be 1, in some cases it will be much higher or lower. It all depends on the amount of leechers on the network. Average ratio of all torrents ever downloaded is currently 1.569 (BT total bytes out / BT total bytes in). I am open to suggestions on how to handle ratio for people that use private trackers.

[TraderTimm]

Have you possibly considered hosting a torrent of the blockchain? I know that it has been done, but having someone to be a dedicated seeder would probably help a great deal.

What do you think?

[Bogart]

Did you know about burnbit.com?

It does the opposite of what Bitfetch does.  It turns an http downloadable file into a torrent.

It's been useful to me a number of times when I needed to download a big file over an unreliable connection.

[Scrat Acorns]

Have you possibly considered hosting a torrent of the blockchain? I know that it has been done, but having someone to be a dedicated seeder would probably help a great deal.

I am seeding Jeff Garzik's blockchain torrent.
It is also available as a direct download here.

Did you know about burnbit.com?

It does the opposite of what Bitfetch does.  It turns an http downloadable file into a torrent.

It's been useful to me a number of times when I needed to download a big file over an unreliable connection.

I have seen it. Download managers generally do the trick of downloading big files over HTTP just fine. Corruptions are not an issue since everything is checksummed over noisy channels (ADSL, 3G, etc) and files are almost guaranteed to stay uncorrupted on my server (ECC, verification). SSL also adds an extra integrity check to each packet. My service is for people who can't or don't want to run a torrent client.

[flower1024]

hello,

i just love your service
just two suggestions:
 - dropbox integration (just place torrents in one dir and let it download with bitfetch)
 - dropbox: place completed files in dropbox


regards
flower

[Scrat Acorns]

hello,

i just love your service
just two suggestions:
 - dropbox integration (just place torrents in one dir and let it download with bitfetch)
 - dropbox: place completed files in dropbox


regards
flower

Thanks!

I think that Dropbox integration goes against the privacy oriented nature of this service. Dropbox API access is not open to everyone - you have to apply for it and get approved. I also don't see the point of watching a dropbox directory for .torrent files, since you can upload them to bitfetch just by clicking a button and they are typically <50kb anyway. Magnet links beat all other methods for convenience though, all it takes is a copy/paste.

I will definitely be adding multiple file upload support (ctrl + clicking multiple files) for browsers that support it.