One of the newest P2P clients to hit the scene is called
BitTyrant and comes at the community with a fresh angle. Reward those who upload and damn those who do not. The program has been developed to monitor the swarm and compare upload speeds. If you have a group of say, 10 peers who's collective upload is 15kbps then all of the sudden, someone connects to the tracker with 35kbps upload capabilities, the client will dynamically throttle the lesser uploaders and give priority to the person who's uploading faster. This essentially sounds great... for the person with the bigger up pipe. Sure, if you unlock your upload, you could gain priority and a slightly better download speed from the tracker, but if you're one of the people who cant upload any faster, you get shafted.
While great in concept, it is poor in execution. Rewarding those who share properly in a community P2P application that is all about sharing is a great idea. Just not at the expense of the entire community. What this would create if BitTyrant were adopted on a large scale by P2P users is a general dissatisfaction for the Bit torrent protocol and could eventually lead to its demise. The only positive that can be pulled from this model is the fact that people who intentionally throttle their upload speeds will be throttled right back. However, it doesn't seem like that would be enough to risk the entire swarm suffering because of a few users connecting with a limited DSL connection.
Source:
ARS Technica
Written by: Dave Horvath @ 4 Jan 2007 5:40
