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Those three (router.bittorrent.com, dht.transmissionbt.com, dht.libtorrent.org) are convenience helpers baked into popular clients. The DHT spec allows any UDP host to act as a router node, and they already do (uTorrent, qBittorrent, Aria2, PicoTorrent, etc.)

This absolutely false. Neither BEP0005, nor Libtorrent even mention any bootstraping nodes. You can run your own bootstraping node, I run one, and every app can cache their previous sessions routing table, and it only takes ONE coincidence for two separate DHTs to be merged accidentally. There is absolutely no bootstraping problem in Bittorrent, if anything it takes extreme care to stop separate networks from accidentally merging. And once merging they never fuckin separate again. I am not making shit up, this a historical fact. View quoted note →