> There is no validation that an infohash corresponds to a real torrent—any client can announce anything. Many crawlers and indexers continuously pick random or sequential infohashes and announce themselves so they can later detect other announcers, and malicious clients or poorly written bots can spam the network with anything they like.

There are also valid clients for completely unrelated protocols using the BitTorrent DHT to find each other.

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sneak 3 days ago | parent [-]

Which? I'm always fascinated by the use of public p2p nets to serve other protocols. The first complete standalone program I wrote was a gnutella p2p client.

	▲	1dom 3 days ago \| parent \| next [-]
		I have the same fascination. You might find https://github.com/dmotz/trystero quite interesting - it's fun to play around with, also can use torrent DHT for discovery.
	▲	aquariusDue 3 days ago \| parent \| prev \| next [-]
		iroh does too: https://www.iroh.computer/docs/concepts/discovery
	▲	pluto_modadic 3 days ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		https://github.com/pubky/pkarr is another one