Is it normal to slowly “bleed out” token balance by tiny bits over time even when not downloading anything? (and none of your seeds are uploading) I noticed this happening recently and I’m wondering if I have something set up incorrectly or if this is just how the system is designed. It’s only a tiny bit of loss so I’m not too worried about it, but I would have assumed it would go UP over time due to other users doing search queries and such. Any ideas?
It is normal to slowly lose tokens. This is due to administrative data that your client has to fetch from the network which costs tokens. However, even if you’re not seeding you should still see your token balance increasing over time because you help the network by being an intermediate node for somebody else’s downloads. That can be irregular so it might look like you’re losing tokens over short periods, but there should definitely be an increase of tokens over longer periods (a few days).
Ok thanks, that makes sense. Overall it seem like seeding happens at very random intervals, like people are coming out of nowhere to grab 3MB from a torrent that is several GB and then run away. Is this also part of how the seeding/anonymity works? I also noticed when I connect to a torrent the peers start really high and then immediately drop down to 0-2 a lot of the time. Is all this normal behavior?
Edit: Also, I understand the network treats you differently based on your contributions, but I was never sure exactly how that works other than you get “preferential treatment”? Does it make my client not download from selfish users as much? Or maybe it gives me more chance of getting to seed someone? I recently lost my old token balance during an update so I’ve been struggling to increase it, and I though maybe the low balance makes it harder to seed at first.
I don’t know enough about downloading and seeding to answer your other question, but I think I can answer this. I think it is easier to understand the preferential treatment if you consider the downloading as a transaction where one party transfers data and the other party pays tokens afterwards. The party that pays afterwards has no risk, because it can verify that the data has been transferred correctly before they pay. The party that transfers the data is risking that the other party cannot or will not pay, so they need to trust the other party. Naturally, the party that transfers data will prefer peers that have a better reputation. So I think that providing services, like uploading and being available as an intermediate node, is not limited for users that have no reputation or a bad reputation. Only downloading or consuming services is limited for such users. But I am not a developer, so I don’t know if this is exactly how Tribler is implemented.
Personally, I’m getting around 1 GB per 4 hours by just leaving Tribler running in the background (without uploading).
So basically my client won’t seed to people who can’t afford my services, and I can’t download if I can’t afford it. That all makes sense, thanks for explaining it.
I’m getting about that much but WITH uploading, so maybe my seeds aren’t actually even getting downloaded. I hardly ever see an upload speed above 0, so maybe those spikes in tokens really are just from the network doing it’s thing.