"Tribler is based on the standard BitTorrent protocol and uses regular BitTorrent trackers to communicate with other peers. But, it can also continue downloading when a central tracker goes down."

Well there we go. A bunch of sensational journalism hype again.

The problem with Tribler then is that the network becomes stagnent once the tracker goes down. Sure peers receive shared connections from one another to create a web architecture but unless you've dialed into a web that has the host of a scene group the group will stagate on content will it not? Without a central tracker to facilitate the sharing of new peer data to prevent the swarm from becoming stale the content will eventually all reach 100% download and remain so with no nocomers being able to find the network.

My knowledge of the DHT and Peer Exchange protocol extensions to BitTorrent are limited but isn't this what they tried to accomplish? How does Tribler make this any better?

I'm stuck on the fence now. Tribler doesn't appear to be new and fantastic because its still strongly relied upon by central servers for bootstrapping abilities. Sure the network established might be large in size but without fresh peer exhanges the swarm will die off once the tracker is brought down.

Someone to enlighten me perhaps?