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The benefit of a random order is that it forces you to actually keep all the packets, which makes upload more likely. Streaming lets you get away with not storing the whole file, which makes bad actors more likely.

And, sure, some BT clients can stream the data, but what the default is makes a huge difference.

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hinkley 5 days ago | parent [-]

People will shut off the moment they get the full file. The randomness means that the last packet is as likely to exist as the first.

Would you want to watch the beginning of something that didn’t have an ending? How frustrating would that be?

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scott_w 5 days ago | parent [-]

> People will shut off the moment they get the full file.

Perhaps but the time spent downloading it is also time spent uploading some of the file, so there's still some benefit. By having it in random order, you more evenly distribute the people with access to different parts of the file.

With streaming, if everyone downloads the same blocks at the same time, "bad actors" can dump all data they already watched to save disk space, harming potential peers that are watching slightly behind.

	▲	hinkley 5 days ago \| parent [-]
		Proof of work has problems with this because you (Mallory) can be paid to be the tertiary durable store for a file and secretly fetch the file from Alice or Bob when asked to prove you have the files. And even if you do something like use a different cypher for each copy the fact that the data is often meant to be public means one could work out the cypher given Alice and Bob and then dump your copy once you have done so. Unless you use public key cryptography, which is so expensive that nobody actually uses it for arbitrarily large inputs.