How do torrent files with "Magnet links" work?

I’ve heard about it to, but I’m not exactly sure how it works. I believe these magnet links use DHT and PEX to connect to peers and download the file. I only know this little from this article on TorrentFreak

Yeah, it seems to say torrent-less downloading. So DHT forego torrents with the PEX somehow? I guess bascially that’s what I don’t understand. How the PEX is managed without a torrent(if that is the case). I feel quite stupid about this.

A hash file contains a string of characters that can uniquely identify a given file. They are generated by an algorithm from the contents of the file, and can thus guarantee that you are downloading the file specified. With this unique identifier, using DHT and PEX, which is basically a relay system between users, you can find other who have the file and begin transferring. There is no need for a torrent to update, you just send messages to others such as “who else has this file that you know of”, “what parts do you have” “can you give me this part” and so on, as well as passing information you know about others to new people on the network. All this info is just passed around, with no need to centrally collect and manage it.
Its distributed baby!

I asked a similar question recently and got some awesome responses including a video. Look here

arpinum> Oki. Sounds like a gossiping back and forth. Centralized vs decentralized, but basically it works the same way then. So, do you create a torrent locally then or what? I mean, how is the hash and the traffic data stored?

Thanks Dog, nice link.

@purpose, the hash is simply a string of hex values. If you hover over a link you can see this after the “bith:” phrase. Stuff tacked on to it just tell your client its name and other metadata it might want to provide. The browser passes this info to your client and it gets to work. I’m not sure how ass the hash tables are stored by each program. Its in the protocol spec, but users don’t need to know.
Some clients allow the creation of a trackerless torrent. It will generate the hex string and pass it through DHT. Of course, you will need to give the string and optionally metadata to people or a website for them to download it. Check the help files of your client to see how to create a trackerless torrent.

Will we be doing redundant decentralized cloudstorage for eachother in the future?