This is a purely FALSE statement!If EVERBODY used BitTyrant, performance would in fact INCREASE!

I’ll explain why:

Imagine everyone using BitTyrant, including you. Your BitTyrant client uploads more to clients who uploads the most to you, as will everyone elses. As a result, slow upload equals slow download speed, fast upload equals fast download speed. You can prove mathematically that in swarms of only BitTyrant clients, every user would have a download speed equal to his or her own upload speed. This is not the case today though. Using traditional bittorrent clients, slow uploaders normally has a higher download than upload speed while the opposite goes for fast uploaders. There are at least two reasons why this is not ideal. First of all, thoose who upload the most doesn’t get proportional compensation. The second reason is that the current allotment will slow down average swarm speed.

BitTyrants protocol is increasing the probability of high speed clients being able to seed. This will increase average swarm speed since high speed users obviously upload faster than slow speed users. As a side effect, BitTyrant also uploads much less to leeching clients (ie increased download speed for honest users). In fact, if everyone used BitTyrant, leaching clients would probably not exist today.

The scenario with increased swarm speed holds true in all swarms with only BitTyrant clients. This is also true in mixed swarms IF everyone who is using BitTyrant has a share ratio of at least 1.00!

BUT, and there is a but. In swarms where only a few of the clients are BitTyrant there is one potential problem. BitTyrant clients will usually finish downloading the torrent faster in mixed swarms as a result of its more advanced protocol, probably with a share ratio of less than 1.00 . This will provide BitTyrant users with the option to upload less by removing the downloaded torrent from the seeding list as soon as it is finished. This would in turn hurt average swarm speed.

Conclution
Increase or decrease in swarm speed will depend on the honesty of BitTyrant users as long as the BitTyrant tit-for-tat protocol is implemented in a minority of clients. If a majority of conventional bittorrent clients would adopt this protocol, the only reasonable effect would be an increased average swarm speed.

He states:
”
Selfishness might work for a single person, but if everybody starts to use BitTyrant, performance will decrease. So, as the makers of the client put it: “When all peers behave selfishly, average performance degrades for all peers, even those with high capacity.”
”

If he bothered to read the paper properly he would have noticed that the client does not work in “selfish” mode by default. The client you download works in strategic mode, which does not cap excess upload capacity.

No wonder there are so many idiotic comments on here when the article isn’t even reading the paper correctly.

Also, as seen on the front page of their website:

Q: Won’t BitTyrant hurt overall BitTorrent performance if everyone uses it?

This is a subtle question and is treated most thoroughly in the paper. The short answer is: maybe. A big difference between BitTyrant and existing BitTorrent clients is that BitTyrant can detect when additional upload contribution is unlikely to improve performance. If a client were truly selfish, it might opt to withhold excess capacity, reducing performance for other users that would have received it. However, our current BitTyrant implementation always contributes excess capacity, even when it might not improve performance. Our goal is to improve performance, not minimize upload contribution.

but you could’ve read that on the site.

that fact is, LEARN HOW SWARMS WORK. Countless I hear friends saying, “ugh, I’m dl at 2-3kb/s I’m blocking my upspeed”

Give and ye shall recieve.

I hope that trackers don’t restrict bittyrant.

and I hope that users dont block bittyrant through plugins.

just share more, I have a ratio of over 5.5

and to be honest, bittyrant isn’t updated much, I wish it was. countless times I’ll be trying to connect to peers and their choked.

simple fact is:

I still seed till my upspeed’s saturated regardless of my client

Older P2P systems (gnutella, kazaa) did nothing almost to encourage uploading, and many users selfishly decided to leech.

Bittorrent’s tit-for-tat scheme rewards users that upload with fast download speeds, and so users find it to be in their own interest to upload as much as possible while downloading.

It’s possible however, to cheat the system by uploading small amounts of data (and giving other lousy download speeds) while downloading much faster.

The new version, BitTyrant, solves the problem by uploading to those that contribute the most (instead of just those that contribute at all).

It may be true that if everybody used the new system with their current upload and download speed limits set, then performance would be degraded, but if everybody used this algorithm, then people would increase their upload speeds to get the better download speeds.

The only people that seem to be harmed by this are those that are trying to maximize their download rate while minimizing the upload rate.

To look at this another way, people are selfish. To say the people should not be selfish and ban this client is the wrong approach. A better strategy is to change the rules of the game so that the strategy which optimizes download speed also maximizes upload speed. That way when a person acts in his own interest, he unintentionally benefits everybody else in the swarm.

Bittorrent is better than anything that came before it because it rewards users who upload. The new strategy provides greater rewards for those who upload, specifically those who upload large amounts of data. To me BitTyrant seems to be something that everybody should adopt for the good of the network.

Also note the difference between the “strategic” method and the “selfish” method (p. 11). “Strategic” means preference for clients with good upload rates. “Selfish” means the same, upstream bandwidth is conserved when it will not benefit the uploader. It seems obvious that adoption of the strategic method will encourage users to increase their upstream bandwidth. The study also notes that this method improves network performance.

Quoted directly from the BitTyrant site:

“Although the evaluation in our paper focuses on users with slightly higher upload capacity than is typically available from US cable / DSL providers today, BitTyrant’s intelligent unchoking and rate selection still improves performance for users with less capacity. All users, regardless of capacity, benefit from using BitTyrant.”