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Tribler Makes Bittorrent Anonymous, Private, And Decentralized

[Tribler](http://tribler.org/) is P2P a file sharing software that has been improving the Bittorrent protocol since 2001. Featuring a Tor-like anonymity network and a decentralized search engine, it may be the most private and decentralized torrenting software in existence.

Bittorrent is known for its incredible censorship resistance, serving as an epic enemy of Intellectual Property (IP) supporters in Hollywood and other government sanctioned corporations. The battle for control over what you are allowed to play, or not, on your computer has been going on since the early days of the Internet and will likely continue for years to come.

The protocol is generally believed to be decentralized, and hence unstoppable. But there is at least one element that is as centralized as anything else on the web, searching for and downloading .torrent files. These small files carry the meta-data necessary to connect to the decentralized network of peers and download movies, music or whatever else, from the swarm.

Most Bittorrent service providers store these files on centralized servers, making them vulnerable to lawyer based attacks and various types of censorship, as demonstrated by the near decade long persecution of the PirateBay founders and developers.

Tribler is a Bittorrent client and backwards compatible version of the file sharing network, which has taken on the challenge of making the most censorship resistant Bittorrent network available, and has successfully bypassed this central point of failure.Unlike many other Bittorrent clients, Tribler has a search engine built into their client which allows users to share .torrent files. Further than this, Tribler stores libraries of these .torrent files on each client, even when the users don’t care about downloading the related file. This means that when you use the Tribler search engine, you are asking hundreds of other Tribler users if they know about a given file, and often they do.

Tribler has also been developing a Tor-like feature which seeks to both encrypt and anonymize the routing of data, creating its own kind of darknet. Bittorrent clients are not at all anonymous. It is arbitrary to find out the ip addresses for users of a given Bitttorrent client, by simply joining the network and asking nodes for information on which files they are sharing. This information can then be used to target, sue or even raid a given user who falls under the cross sights of law enforcement or the copyright lobby.

Tibler’s website explains: “Bittorrent offers no privacy protection. It is easily traced that you are downloading certain (controversial) content. Content is offered openly and everybody can see who is doing what. Dissidents and unpopular opinions can be easily discovered and subsequently stopped.”

The latest version of Tribler comes equipped with this Tor-like security, which protects both uploaders and downloaders of content.

The download speed is also presented as not being particularly affected with an impressive 1.5 MB download speed even through all the Tor-like routing.

This  privacy feature however is still very young and experimental and Tribler is loud and clear about its current limitations.

“Do not put yourself in danger. Our anonymity is not yet mature … Tribler does not protect you against spooks and government agencies. We are a torrent client and aim to protect you against lawyer-based attacks and censorship. With help from many volunteers we are continuously evolving and improving.”

**Update:**Another significant limitation, is that Tribler does not appear to support torrent traffic encryption. This means that while their Tor-like features may make you quite hard to identify to other Tribler users, your ISP could recognize your traffic as torrenting and take action based on their policies. The use of a good VPN will work around this problem, but will also usually slow your download speed. 

Given the wide spectrum of content on the net, and the varied approach to what is ethical or legal content to distribute, concerns about what kind of content you are supporting as a Tribler node are very legitimate. At the front line of this battle are seeders, users that store and upload copyrighted content. Seeders are often targeted, and in some occasions raided, by authorities on behalf of IP rights holders.

To mitigate the risk of supporting the sharing of illegal or unethical content, Tribler allows you to flag content as ‘spam’ which practically means you won’t be telling anyone about a given piece of content, effectively taking back your support for the sharing of a given file.

So keep that in mind if you intend to upload content disapproved of by the powers that be. Of course you can use VPNs to add another layer of protection to your identity, but these will often slow down your torrenting. Unless you are uploading massive amounts of files or very illegal content, then chances are you will be ok.

Tribler has been adding features like these to its client for years, making it very sophisticated and efficient. Even after all these upgrades, it remains backwards compatible with other Bittorrent clients. So if a given file is not available on its decentralized network, you can add magnet links or .torrent files to Tribler and it will download and add them to the network, much like any other Bittorrent software would do.

I have been testing out Tribler for over a month and have been consistently impressed with its download speed. Torrent links that have decent health, often reach download speeds of Mbs per second, and seem to be ready for consumption in minutes.

If you are like me, downloading movies with Tribler will remind of you of the exciting days of LimeWire, which would let you download any song within 3 or 4 minutes. Except now we are dealing with files many times larger.

(Of course, all this downloading was purely for research purposes.)

Tribler is so fast, that it includes a streaming feature, which lets you -that’s right- stream media and watch it live, without having to wait for a full download. However this often depends on how healthy a given file is, aka – how many other users are ‘seeding’ it.

Seeders have full control over how much of their bandwidth they are willing to contribute to the network, if any.

Tribler boasts its ambitions to create the decentralized equivalent of Youtube, allowing users to upload and consume all kinds of content, regardless of what local jurisdictions consider legal. This is especially important when discussing civil liberties or the coverage of violent oppression in totalitarian nations.

The lengths to which governments are willing to go to, to censor freedom of speech was remarkably demonstrated during the Arab Spring, to name just one example.

The problem with relying on Bittorrent for content that is not very popular, or that suffers from a high risk of censorship, is that the incentives are rarely worth it. Tribler gives seeders reputation markers which improves their download experience, but that is arguably not enough when you are risking legal threats.

The riskier or less popular a given file is, the less seeds there will likely be and the harder and slower it will be to find it and download it.

But there is a solution to this.


JoySteam, the blockchain infused Bittorrent client was designed with this problem in mind, atleast partially. Joystream allows any seeders of Bittorrent compatible content to request Bitcoin micropayments in exchange for storing a given file and uploading it.

This brings a stronger incentive to seed all kinds of content, but given that popular content is easy to download, it will be most valuable for those rare gems that you wish you could easily have access to. Like very old movies, esoteric indie art, or yes, suppressed footage of totalitarian oppression.

This may be one of the missing píeces to creating a decentralized youtube. Specially if we want download speeds capable of streaming.

Tribler is funded by a variety of universities and claims to support a full time team of more than 10 engineers. It’s home base is the Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands.


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