Pirate Bay Retires the World’s Largest BitTorrent Tracker

Operators of the The Pirate Bay shuttered the site's BitTorrent tracker on Tuesday, six years after it was founded.

Trackers - the servers that bootstrap each BitTorrent download – are no longer necessary with enhancements like DHT and PEX that allow peers to locate one another without accessing a central server, site operators wrote in the Bay's blog.

"Now that the decentralized system for finding peers is so well developed, TPB has decided that there is no need to run a tracker anymore, so it will remain down!" reads the announcement. "It's the end of an era."

"This is what we consider to be the future," the Bay wrote. "Faster and more stability for the users because there is no central point to rely upon."

:story: Full story: Wired News