As seen on Slashdot, the latest betas (4.1) of the official BitTorrent client support now trackerless publishing. This won't help a lot for seeding warez
and movies (but that's not the intention of BitTorrent anyway), but will make it a lot easier publishing torrents for eg. podcasters.
Silvan and I discussed lately, how to offer easy torrent podcasting to the masses. While it's theoretically quite easy to run a torrent tracker, if you want to use them seriously, it has to be an always-running process on a server and you can't do that in your standard (and also not so standard) hosting package. There are some other issues, but
we found some solutions to make a nice and distributed tracker setup with no hassle for the users uploading their podcasts. But with the trackerless BitTorrent support, that's not needed anymore (lucky us, we didn't do more than discussing it ;) ), all you have to do is upload the torrent to a webserver (and seed it, of course).
Why bother anyway, simple podcasting (without bittorrent) works good enough, you may say. Yes it does, but you have a big scalability problem. If you have a lengthy MP3 show and dozens of people are downloading that at the same time (because their podcasting clients start downloading it, as soon as you publish it, for exampleā¦), your
bandwidth will soon be saturated, if you're not google or archive.org ;)
I hope that most bittorrent clients will implement that trackerless support and that the official bittorrent guys and the azureus people can get their act together and agree on one trackerless bittorrent protocol (currently they are incompatible).