When Quora was initially gaining traction I spent a lot of time on the site, going as far as writing some answers of my own. Over time my interest in Quora has faded, but I have one lasting (and not-so-fond) memory of Quora moderation deleting what I thought was a well-crafted response.
The question in question
Well, is it? Here is my now-deleted answer:
Sure it is.
Researchers at University of Washington and UMass Amherst developed a strategic BitTorrent client called BitTyrant [1] which exploits the over-generous altruism in the BitTorrent protocol to improve download performance.
The BitTyrant client greedily optimizes for a set of neighbor peers with large reciprocal bandwidths to maximize the download bandwidth per connection, dynamically balancing the size and set of active peer to maximize reciprocated data flow. More importantly, the client still contributes to the swarm like a good BitTorrent worker bee.
Note that BitTyrant has allegedly been blocked by a number of trackers, so by using it it’s also “really possible” to slow down a torrent download to 0Mbps.
Footnotes
[1] BitTyrant: A strategic BitTorrent client that improves performance