Information Cascades in Torrents
source – http://thepiratebay.se/search/Guardians%20of%20the%20galaxy/0/7/0
On many peer to peer filing sharing site when you search for a file, you tend to see that there is always a top torrent, ahead by a large percentage over the other torrents. Typically it is easy to see that there is an exponential drop in seeders from the top torrent. We can see that this is the case for searching for “Guardians of the Galaxy” on ThePirateBay. We see that the top torrent has 35107 seeders, but the next most popular torrent only has 10834 seeders. And as we progress down the list we can see that the tenth most popular only has 1541, which is only 4.3% of our most popular torrent. There is a clear trend of exponential decay in the amount of seeders for torrents for this specific search, but if you search more, you will see it happens for most searches too. But what does this imply?
This phenomena implies that with torrents we have an information cascade which results in one torrent becoming extremely popular over others. This is because after we get through initial fluctuations of a torrent, a user who looks a the number of seeders of each torrent, will want the most trusted one so as to not get a cease and desist from their ISP, or get a virus from the file, but also have a fast torrent. When the user looks at the list, they tend to choose the top one, because they assume that if so many other people have chosen to seed the torrent, then it is least likely to harbor viruses, upset ISPs, or be slow. This leads to most people deciding to choose the top torrent in a list, which is obvious when we look at our search from earlier.
This can backfire though because it is still possible to have a false information cascade. For it is rumored that some companies will inflate the number of the first few torrents, this way the information cascade begins and these become the most popular torrents, and then use them to compile a large list of users who are inflicting copyright laws, and then take legal action. It can also be false in the sense that the first people can not notice that a virus is in the files, this can lead to many users having their systems infected as they all trust the infected torrent based on the decisions of those before them. This happened with a cracked copy of Watchdogs, as when it first came out, the top torrent at the time has 10,000+ seeders and many leechers at the time. But the file actually contained a virus which turned your computer into a bitcoin miner for the original sharer, showing that we had a false information cascade which damaged many people’s systems.
http://www.geek.com/games/clever-pirate-adds-bitcoin-miner-to-watch-dogs-torrent-1594858/