Q: First time launch, downloading blockchain

[Automatic]

Somewhat confused, first time installing Armory on this new version, it claims it's "Downloading via Armory CDN", yet, also claims it's downloading via a torrent from 29 peers. Which is it? A CDN or torrent? I wouldn't really call a torrent a "Armory's" CDN.

Second of all, who is seeding this torrent? Am I seeding this torrent? I didn't ask to seed this torrent.

Third, where is this torrent? Can I have a copy? I can't seem to find it:-

Code:

[user@Desktop ~]$ find /opt/armory-git/BitTornado -iname '*.torrent'
[user@Desktop ~]$

I couldn't find it either by searching the source for "Magnet". I was able to find 'bootstrap.dat.torrent' in announcemap.txt which googling it pointed me to this bitcointalk thread, but, that's a little too large of a jump to make without any sort of confirmation.

[etotheipi]

It's the "Armory CDN" because we (Armory Technologies) is running 30-something seedboxes to seed the torrent download for all users who run Armory.  So your 29 peers are Armory's resources ... hence the "Armory CDN"

It's a long story why we don't use the default torrent, but part of it is that it gives us better control, and we disabled uploading so we make up for that by providing all the bandwidth for it.

P.S. - the torrent file and the torrent itself gets downloaded to your --satoshi-datadir, probably /home/<user>/.bitcoin.  We periodically distribute a new .torrent with the latest blockchain files, using the new announcement system (which is offline-signed: https://s3.amazonaws.com/bitcoinarmory-media/announce.txt).  We'll be uploading a new version shortly with the last 2-3 week's worth of blockchain history

[Automatic]

It's the "Armory CDN" because we (Armory Technologies) is running 30-something seedboxes to seed the torrent download for all users who run Armory.  So your 29 peers are Armory's resources ... hence the "Armory CDN"

It's a long story why we don't use the default torrent, but part of it is that it gives us better control, and we disabled uploading so we make up for that by providing all the bandwidth for it.

P.S. - the torrent file and the torrent itself gets downloaded to your --satoshi-datadir, probably /home/<user>/.bitcoin.  We periodically distribute a new .torrent with the latest blockchain files, using the new announcement system (which is offline-signed: https://s3.amazonaws.com/bitcoinarmory-media/announce.txt).  We'll be uploading a new version shortly with the last 2-3 week's worth of blockchain history

Fair enough, so, the only peers are Armory (And people who have manually imported the .torrent from their .bitcoin DIR to a torrent client)? No upload is forced?

[etotheipi]

Fair enough, so, the only peers are Armory (And people who have manually imported the .torrent from their .bitcoin DIR to a torrent client)? No upload is forced?

A couple other users promised to support the seeding, but we worked out the math and are comfortable that we have enough bandwidth without any external help.  And the seedboxes are all spread out with different services and geographically to avoid single points of failure.  And even if they do all go down, armory will detect slow downloading and revert to using regular P2P.

I hardcoded  max upload speed and upload connections to zero.  Further, the torrent engine shuts down after it's done and doesn't even start if it detects a built Bitcoin core database.  Lastly, if you still don't want it, you can run with --disable-torrent to not even try.  I think I added a settings option, too. 

And if you're really scared for whatever reason, you can actually remove the entire BitTornado directory and Armory will run fine with out it.  It will simply let Bitcoin core download over P2P.

As you can probably tell, I was pretty careful to cover all our bases :-)