In Tribler, you compensate other users for the bandwidth you use when downloading with anonymity. When uploading content to other (Tribler) users, you earn bandwidth tokens. If you accumulate more bandwidth tokens, you get preferential treatment when downloading with anonymity, which results in higher download speeds.
Since you earn tokens only when you upload to some other Tribler users anonymity, you may not have the content others are looking for. Token Mining feature of Tribler is supposed to solve that. If you enable Token Mining, you will be able to mine on a channel. By mining, you’ll be downloading some torrents or part of it first in the hope that you’ll get some uploads. If the channel is popular and contains well-desired content, you are likely to earn a high amount of tokens. But it requires selecting a good channel which is very difficult to know in advance. Therefore, we’re developing and testing an automated algorithm/policy for selecting good torrents so that you can get tokens just by leaving Trible idle. Developing such a mining policy is not easy however, which is why it will take sometime before the policy becomes really profitable for the miner.
The new policy is called Multi-level Investment policy. In this policy, we start at the basic level where we only download a small chunk of torrent and then set it to upload mode. If there is demand for the token then we’ll see some uploads. At each level, a torrent gets upgraded to a new level when it has uploaded sufficiently. This enforces that only good torrents get to the higher level. This is all about reducing the risk by promoting good investment and detecting and removing the bad investment early on.
The screenshot below shows the UI for token mining.
We hope to ship automated token mining in Tribler 7.2.0 stable release. Stay tuned.