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Comment by eridius | Hacker News Reader

Something I've always wondered (but been too lazy to research on my own) with this sort of thing is, in the absence of any centralized point, how do new users even find the swarm? My assumption is that all of these networks have at least one (or a handful of) centralized server that acts as a stepping stone to find the swarm. Is there something obvious I'm missing?

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That's the typical approach. Either the client ships with a list of IPs / hostnames for seed servers, or you update a single well known DNS name with a bunch of A records. For maximum resilience you can put a whole series of DNS names in the client under different national registrars. This is often how botnets receive command and control messages - lookup RANDOM_HEX.ch and download a signed script to run.

What's special about the .ch ?

Switzerland is neutral.

I figured that's what existing p2p solutions did. Does Tribler do that too? Because it can't really claim to not rely on central servers at all if it still needs them as a stepping stone.

from article: "One thing that could theoretically cause issues, is the capability for starting users to find new peers. To be on the safe side the Tribler team is still looking for people who want to act as so called bootstraptribler peers. These users will act as superpeers, who distribute lists of active downloaders.

“Together with software bugs and a code cleanup, that is now our last known weakness,” says Pouwelse.

I guess to solve that problem the distribution must be decentralized and supernode adress delivered with client (as stated in above comment)

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