Tribler

Through Stephen Downe's olDaily I got interested in an article about educational uses of peer to peer file transfer.BitTorrent: An Educational Autopsy of the Hydra by bavtuesdays. It has a good explanation of what bit-torrents is and how it works, as well as an explanation of the debates around it. I also got directed to check out a project at Harvard School of Engineering... Tribler, a p2p system that, as far as I can tell, uses bandwidth as currency (to give incentives to users who "seed"). I am about to download it and try it out. You can find it here: http://tv.seas.harvard.edu/. I have to options to download a client: Minimize upload to others and maximize download 15% or simetrical download/upload, normal speed download. I don't know what to pick. Seems weird. I get better download if I don't reciprocate? I think I'm not getting it. The FAQ says:

"If you select the right download version, the Tribler client will upload as much as it downloads. This version is "balanced" in the sense that for every piece that you want to download you also have to upload a piece of the same size. If you select the left download version, the Tribler client will optimize the file sharing algorithm to speed up your downloads, minimizing your upload to others. While this improves the speed of your personal video downloads, other users will not be able to benefit from your videos as much as with the right version which then consequently reduces their download speed."

But then it also says:

"Obviously, the upload/download ratio averaged over the whole file sharing network has to be 1:1. Thus, it is a serious problem that many users have an asymmetric Internet connection. This is one of the biggest problems with the BitTorrent protocol, where most trades happen with a tit-for-tat mechanism. Thus, even though you might have 1Mbit of download bandwidth, your 125kbit upload bandwidth prevents you from fast downloads. With virtual credits, we want to alleviate this problem. The idea is that when you leave your computer on (over night, during vacation, when you are working,...) you can earn credits such that when you actually want to download a video (or watch something on demand) you will get get the full download speed."

I have an asymmetric connection, of course. Nevertheless, I'll go for the symmetrical version of the client and upload more. I guess this decision is part of their research. I choose to share more in order to get, in the end, faster download speeds. Am I reasoning this right? Finally here's a video on Tribler: