Yes, that's right. Your tracker has already been using the DHT to find peers for quite some time. Here's a brief explanation of trackers and DHT, hope its helpf

Yes, that's right. Your tracker has already been using the DHT to find peers for quite some time. Here's a brief explanation of trackers and DHT, hope its helpful: A tracker serves 2 purposes: 1) Hosting the .torrent file (which is basically just a list of checksums for each piece) 2) Initial matchmaking of peers, and keeping track of "who has what" #1 isn't a huge problem, as the .torrent files are tiny and pretty simple to find. #2 is where most of the value of the tracker comes in, because it lets each peer in a swarm find out about the others, so they can connect directly. However, once peers have found each other they'll connect and communicate directly. In the traditional torrent model, with a tracker, your client pings the tracker every 20 minutes or so for a list of new peers who have joined the swarm. From that list, you'll attempt to connect directly to new peers. A DHT (distributed hash table) is a nice hack that is meant to take load off the central tracker. In essence, instead of always asking the tracker for a list of new peers or who has a specific piece, you can ask the peers you are already connected to. Its kind of like an office, where you ask questions of your coworkers before bothering your boss. This is why you can download torrents even when the tracker is unreachable, or in this case, taken offline completely. This is also why you can download torrents from demonoid without a demonoid account - the account just gives you access to the demonoid tracker, which you don't necessarily need. I'm a little hazy on how a swarm would start without a tracker, as it seems like a decently sized swarm is needed to get the ball rolling, so to speak. Perhaps someone else can jump in?