The creator of BitTorrent refuses to help private BitTorrent trackers, accusing them of being destructive to sharing. Despite the increasing sophistication and potential disruption posed by the latest generation of ratio cheating software, BitTorrent creator and developer Bram Cohen has reiterated his refusal to change the protocol.

Some private BitTorrent trackers monitor their members to ensure users upload as much as they download. Supporters say monitoring the upload/download ratio encourages sharing, resulting in faster download speeds. Those who do not reach the minimum ratio are normally banned from using the tracker.

To monitor user ratios’, trackers depend on clients reporting their true upload and download statistics. Programmers are increasingly exploiting this vulnerability by developing software which falsifies upload and download reports to the tracker.

The exploit was first widely publicized over a year ago, but no solution has yet been found. Only standard code is sent to the tracker, which is impossible to verify using the current BitTorrent protocol.

As ratio cheating software is becoming easier to use and more readily available, the pressure is on Bram Cohen and BitTorrent Inc. to update the protocol to catch ratio “cheats”.

However, Bram Cohen has told Zeropaid that he stands by the comments he made in 2005, arguing that ratio monitoring is destructive to sharing.

“[Leechers are] engaging in perfectly reasonable and non-destructive behavior and the site is trying to punish him for it, thus fostering the creation of clients which lie about their statistics. This is the site's fault, and the result could do serious damage to the value of BitTorrent statistics generally. Sites which do this are being extremely destructive, and the way they grandstand about how they're fostering sharing really ticks me off,” he said.

Bram argues that the tit-for-tat nature of protocol is sufficient enough to stop destructive leeching. The BitTorrent protocol is robust enough to handle file sharers who limit their upload and do not seed after the file has finished downloading.

“Even if almost everyone quit the instant their download was completed you'd still have decent download rates, they'd just be closer to everyone's upload rates,” he explains.

By definition this means download speeds will be slower, which could easily be classed as “destructive”.