14 DAY TRIAL // BitTorrent is labeled as one of the greatest peer-to-peer technology, and is certainly the most popular, yet the file-sharing protocol still relies on several centralized points for the users to either find the files they are looking for or each other.
There have been several attempts at making BitTorrent less dependant on these central points and the latest Tribler 5.3 client is the first to offer a full, top-to-bottom P2P solution.
Tribler 5.3 is a rather obscure BitTorrent client that comes with some very interesting technologies and is spearheading development in several areas.
Tribler excels at being a complete P2P application. The BitTorrent-dedicated blog TorrentFreak labeled it the first "truly decentralized BitTorrent" client.
The latest version enables users to search and download the files they want from inside the client. Plenty of other clients offer search features, including the ever-popular uTorrent, but Tribler's results come from other peers rather than a dedicated search engine.
Users search for the files they want and then start downloading it without any server getting involved, everything is done among peers, without the need of a search indexer or a BitTorrent tracker.
BitTorrent is a peer-to-peer technology in the sense that files are downloaded from other users rather than a dedicated web server. However, before files can be downloaded, you have to find the torrent you are looking for and then find other people who have the files.
This means first using a BitTorrent search engine, like the notorious Pirate Bay. These search engines only have a link to a .torrent file which contains the details about the BitTorrent but no actual content.
Once you've downloaded the .torrent file, your client has to find people who have the files you want on their hard drives. In the past, this meant using a BitTorrent tracker which, as the name implies, kept track of everyone downloading and who had which portion of the files you needed.
More recently, the need for a tracker has been replaced by technologies like peer exchange (PXE) and distributed hash tables (DHT). But there are no replacements for BitTorrent search engines and indexers making this a weak point for the P2P technology. Tribler 5.3 changes that.
Tribler 5.3 comes with other interesting features such as streaming for media files, like uTorrent, and spam control with the help of the users.
Since Tribler isn't a particularly popular BitTorrent client, there are significantly fewer torrents to search from compared to popular BitTorrent search engines, however, if it can get a little more traction, that number should grow significantly.
Tribler 5.3 for Windows is available for download here.