Erigon pulls historical data over BitTorrent, not the Ethereum p2p network. The reason is incentives: nobody is paid to serve old blocks, so peers for that data are scarce and unreliable. Snapshots are immutable files, content-addressed, perfect for a distribution protocol. Two sources feed the same download. The P2P swarm, and webseed, plain HTTPS servers we host that expose the same files. The torrent client treats a webseed as a peer holding 100% of the pieces, so a new node never waits for peers to appear, while the swarm absorbs the load as a file gets popular. Our bandwidth cost falls as adoption rises. No extra trust either way: every piece is checked against hashes shipped inside the binary, whether it came from a peer or from us. Snapshots are pulled once, at node creation. After that the node builds its own segments, then seeds them back. https://t.co/J4c5v4DfgS #Erigon #Ethereum