BitTyrant: The Selfish BitTorrent Client

Based on the Azureus 2.5 codebase, BitTyrant has one distinct feature — it’s designed to maximize the download speed of the user by only connecting to the fastest peers, and to choose peers that send more data than they receive. This means that an individual using BitTyrant could conceivably download something faster than someone with the same connection but a different client.

But what’s good for the goose isn’t good for the gander. As TorrentFreak points out, “Selfishness might work for a single person, but if everybody starts to use BitTyrant, performance will decrease.” My share ratio is hard enough to keep at 1:1 as it is, so I doubt I’ll be using this. But if you’re feeling particularly selfish, have lots of karma banked with the cosmos, or suffer from achingly slow downloads in need of any boost possible, check it out and report back in the comments.