Up until the release of 7.1.2, Tribler was working well for me, as I have been using it for a few years, on various forms of Debian. But since then, and also with 7.1.3, downloading has come to a halt. It doesn’t seem to matter what my up/down ratio is for any torrent. And it doesn’t seem to matter what I mine.
Before I get to my main problem, I need to say this about Credit Mining: It just “smells bad”.
- It seems to be a special kind of download subscription for downloads I mostly don’t want
- There seems to be no way of knowing whether any other Tribler user wants them either (and why would they, since we all now are encouraged to mine something to get credits? We’re all serving the same dish to each other.)
- I have seen files begin to download, and I find some of the names interesting so I anticipate them being downloaded, and then they just disappear before completing.
- Mined torrents default to the least anonymity, and yet the user simultaneously has the least amount of control over what gets downloaded (as compared to downloading via magnet link, with higher anonymity). We don’t really know what is going to appear in these channels at all.
- The download process is so slow, I’ve rarely seen anything over a few percent complete, except on some tiny torrents like text.
- The token balance only ever seems to become more negative, even when all of my wanted downloads are stopped.
- There is a logical disconnect between seeding other Tribler users’ torrents to other Tribler users, and simply participating in the anonymization network, receiving and forwarding things on to other clients. My client shouldn’t have to know anything about a block of content simply to receive it from one machine, encrypt it one level, and pass it along to another machine.
- The credit mining disincentivizes seeding back to non-Tribler users, by seemingly making that a cost. Tribler is not popular enough to make this a reasonable or fair strategy.
As for the files I do want to download, the ultimate reason for this post, even after I delete the sqlite/trustchain.db and *.pem files relating to my token, and start fresh, almost nothing happens. At most, a few megabytes are downloaded. My router indicates Tribler is accessing the internet almost constantly, but transferring almost nothing.
I have a decent amount of resource to share, over multiple connections. I am the kind of user you want. But Tribler is incapable of sharing my resource, for anyone’s benefit, including my own.