[rich90usa]

At least according to Wikipedia references, BitTorrent Inc's own client had mainline DHT support since version 4.2 (~2005). uTorrent seems to have added support for mainline DHT some time before the acquisition as well. There's a good torrentfreak post from the 10 year anniversary that covers the history pretty well: https://torrentfreak.com/bittorrents-dht-turns-10-years-old-...

I'm guessing that your "by default now" may actually be in regards to BitComet and the v0.60 client that upset some folk?

Besides the BEP44 implementation magila mentioned, BitTorrent Inc. also assists with the DHT by operating a public bootstrap server at router.[bittorrent|utorrent].com, and provides the source too: https://github.com/bittorrent/bootstrap-dht

[micro_softy]

What is the key difference between "central servers" and "bootstrap servers"?

I mean DHT is "decntralized" once the client has a copy, but initially a client has to get a copy of it from somehwere.

And unless every client gets the DHT from a different source, the system seems "centralized" in that sense.

[cjbprime]

Clients are allowed to store nodes received by the bootstrap servers and use them again at next startup, so the centralization is only on first run of the app.

[Senji]

You could include a snapshot of the DHT on compile time.

[cjbprime]

Yes, by "the DHT store" I meant BEP44's new (2014) emergent database on top of the DHT; not the DHT itself.

Thanks for the answer.