Private Torrent Sites Overemphasize Share Ratios According to Bram Cohen
Bram Cohen, inventor of the BitTorrent protocol believes that private torrent sites should stop tracking the ratios of their users the way they do now. He argues that the sites are overemphasizing the importance of the upload / download ratio, which fosters the creation of ratio cheating software, and calls it “extremely destructive”.
Bram Cohen told Zeropaid:
“[Leechers are] engaging in perfectly reasonable and non-destructive behavior and the site is trying to punish him for it, thus fostering the creation of clients which lie about their statistics. This is the site’s fault, and the result could do serious damage to the value of BitTorrent statistics generally. Sites which do this are being extremely destructive, and the way they grandstand about how they’re fostering sharing really ticks me off.”
According to Bram the nature of the BitTorrent protocol is built to prevent freeriding. Its Tit-for-Tat algorithm makes sure that you only upload pieces of the file to people who offer something to you. The more you upload to others, the more you receive. By overestimating the importance of the share ratio, it becomes almost impossible for some to actually reach a decent share ratio.
He continues:
“Just a little bit of threatening to ban people can get the overall balance to be very heavily weighted on the side of uploading, making it difficult for people to accomplish a reasonable amount of upload even if they try.”
To prevent overseeded torrents from “messing up” peoples ratio Bram suggest an alternative method to calculate the share ratio:
“When a client reports new downloads to the tracker, the tracker can multiply the amount by (number of current peers total – number of current seeds) / (number of current peers total) and add that to the ‘total downloaded’. This results in most people having a ‘ratio’ of more than 1, but that isn’t actually a problem unless you’re more interested in mathematical purity than practical behavior.”
