KnifeMissile

Since many Bit Torrent sites have now been closed, there has (of course) been a lot of talk about it and one of the things I see a lot is that Bit Torrent's "flaw" is that it requires a centralized server (the tracker).

Now, anyone who says anything like this obviously doesn't understand Bit Torrent. Just in case such people exist on this board and have read this thread, I will say this now: Bit Torrent was never intended as a tool for mass copyright infringement. It is merely a tool to allow people to pay for their own bandwidth.

An analogy can be made with online shopping. Online shops must remain competative but it will be extremely hard to do so if they have to pay for the shipping of their products to their customers. It's rather expensive to ship physical objects across the country (or the world!) and this would raise their prices too high to remain competative. How do they overcome this? By asking the buyer to pay for their own shipping.
This is exactly what Bit Torrent does. It's a method for the downloader to pay for their own bandwidth, because the server (uploader) can't afford the bandwidth of uploading all their data to all those downloaders. With this goal in mind, it's not hard to see why having a centralized tracker is not, nor is ever, a problem...