The world's largest BitTorrent site, The Pirate Bay, as reported previously, will stop linking to .torrent files shortly and replace them with magnet links. Magnet links have a pretty big advantage over .torrent files, where they're much more portable, and easier to copy. On top of this, a new torrent link on TPB lists all titles and magnet links, where the public can download a copy that would fit onto even the smallest USB flash drive, or if you're still rocking those floppies, a few of them, too.

TPB told TorrentFreak that one of the advantages to a "magnet site" is that it requires little bandwidth to host a proxy site. A proxy site is required as TPB is blocked in many countries, and is of course, going to increase. Think it can't happen? Well, Pirate Bay user "allisfine" was intrigued by this idea, and has decided to find out just how small a copy of TPB would be. He told TorrentFreak:

I did a complete snapshot of ALL the Pirate Bay torrents, in case somebody wants to close it or something similarly crazy.

Using the following script, "allisfine" copied the title, id, file size, seeds, leechers and magnet links of 1,643,194 torrents. The end result? A full copy of all magnet links on The Pirate Bay drums up to 90MB zipped, or 164MB unzipped. A little strange however, is The Pirate Bay lists a total of 4,199,832 torrents, not the 90MB-sized zip that includes just 1,643,194 torrents. But, the latter number points to the torrents that are available on several public trackers, where TPB itself hosts just a small number of them.

I'm sure all of this doesn't help the founders, who are facing jail time.