We love to have more help! Hardest part is debugging.
So running Tribler and reporting bug in Github. We are in desperate need of Win/Mac/Linux users which will help us with reproduce bugs. One time we found bugs in Python Async IO standard lib [1]. The 'once in a week' bugs are difficult to capture.
From my outsider's view, the part where you need the most help is actually your website.
From the https://tribler.org homepage it's very hard to figure out what tribler actually is, and the only screenshots are hidden away in the support and developer categories, and all feature vastly different menu items (without clear indication how to get those features, if they even still exist). The API documentation isn't linked anywhere.
And while installing the client and downloading your first torrent is easy enough, there isn't a lot of info on how to do anything else. And the help that does exist is outdated or wrong. The https://www.tribler.org/howto.html seems to be for a completely different version than what I get when I download and install the Windows version, and 3 out of 4 steps don't work as described (The text in 2 is completely wrong/outdated, I don't even have the menu item for 3, nor the icon for 4)
But not much else about it. Would be interested to read more. Using torrent seeding as a form of Proof-of-Work that rewards tokens is actually an interesting use case for cryptocurrency, and not as energy-hungry. But no global consensus is different from any crypto I've ever heard of. How does it keep a consistent ledger or who owns what tokens?
I've always had a sort of knee jerk reaction against distributed systems that enforce global consistency at the protocol level. Wherever there's a conch to have or not have, also there will be the haves and the have nots.
Better, says my gut, to let either sides of a contradiction compete for legitimacy in the eyes of whatever local audiences are relevant.
Assuming consensus from the get go just doesn't seem to square with how large groups of people actually work.
So I hope that these alternatives work out for them because I'd like to have more examples to point at when I try to express this.
Haha, good Lord of the Flies reference. Yes let's decentralize all the conchs, make them all local.
Though, due to positive feedback and winner-take-all effects in complex systems like human economies, I don't believe that's a stable equilibrium. The critical resources of systems will concentrate and consolidate over time. The question is whether there's any way to manage that in the architecture or protocol to minimize the resulting harm, or whether it's better not to try.
I'd be skeptical of arguments that it's better not to try.
Once the winners take all, they tend to redecorate such that their power is easy to keep and hard to lose. Once they've done that, they don't have to worry so much about continuing to display whatever merits made them winners in the first place. No need to deliver on whatever promises made. No need to support whatever products sold. You're on top, your enemies are pre-crushed, you can now relax.
I agree that protecting our ability to revoke their legitimacy is not a path to a stable equilibrium. It'll take work to ensure that they can not in fact relax. But I think it's work worth doing. Much like how a farmer selects cultivars based on their desirable properties, so should should the masses wield their ability to revoke legitimacy and artificially select a more desirable culture among their leadership.
...which is why consistency is the wrong part of the CAP theorem to preserve. It makes it possible for the powerful to forbid states where they're later not powerful by labeling those states "inconsistent". If you have consistency, revoking their legitimacy means abandoning the protocol.
If inconsistency is possible, you don't have to rebuild anything. Instead just reconfigure your part of it to trust different people.
The reason I don't run TOR exit nodes is that I neither wish to support criminal activity (of at least certain types) nor do I want to get entangled with law enforcement for doing so. Since this is TOR-like, what are my legal liabilities if I am running this software?
But can you download data from regular bittorrent peers using Tribler? And if yes, how does my traffic reach them?
Suppose I want to download a torrent that's only seeded by one person running Deluge. My understanding was that this would involve making a connection to another Tribler user, and that user making the connection to that seeder. That would make every client a sort of exit node for bittorrent traffic, even for torrents they don't download. Is that not how it works?
