educative.io

Slight tweak to "leecher" definition

Courses
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#1

On Educative: Interactive Courses for Software Developers you say:

A seeder is a node that hosts the data on its system and provides bandwidth to upload the data to the network, and a leecher is a node that downloads the data from the network.

In GENERAL peer-to-peer discussion, a leecher is a node that consumes from the network without contributing back. A regular participating node both offering and consuming services and resources would not be considered a leech. The exception to this would be Bittorrent, where any consuming node is called a leech, even if it is also providing seeds and uploading data.

#2

Hi Brian!
Yeah, you’re absolutely right that leecher does not contribute to providing/ uploading the data. But since BitTorrent is a protocol that uses a P2P type of network, where a node can also download and upload data. Here we have described just the concept of a leecher that downloads the data from the network in a P2P network. That’s why we’ve used the leecher term here.

Hope it helps. If you still have any queries please let us know.
Thank you!

#3

@Brian_Gallagher If a node downloads data from the network, it is typically called a leech. However, the same node can act as both a seed and a leech, possibly being called a participating node.