The same question was archived on r/trackers. Would like to get notified when a compatible tracker is available for testing, it’s not even clear if there is an implementation just yet.
The specs are here since 2017 https://www.bittorrent.org/beps/bep_0052.html
Compatible clients are available, at least qBittorrent (from v4.4.0) and BiglyBT.
I can’t speak to current state; but with any luck we are approaching / entering the post-tracker era. DHT handles the actual “tracking”, and other components are (very slowly) coming out to handle search and reputation.
Is there an TL;DR of the advantages over BitTorrent V1?
Restored security (SHA-256) is the first reason.
But what’s most interesting to me is the single files hashes.
Each individual file will get it’s own hash, reachable from the DHT. It also seems that there will be some kind of standard hashing method allowing to get unique reproducible hashes (no more piece size or parameters). Two persons would always obtain the same hash for the same file even for different torrents. This is all to reduce swarm fragmentation.
So it would be similar to IPFS (except this one broke his promises by introducing several multihash versions…).
No, not yet, this question was probably posted by me. I’m one of the provocators to switch to the new protocol.
The thing is the most tracker admins are:
- Too lazy to implement it.
- Have too little information about its benefits.
- Only heard downfalls associated by compatibility problems, which were exxagerated by people who don’t like to update their software.
I even created a tool called tmrr. Which allows you to extract, compare and calculate file hashes (BTMR hash precisely — BitTorrent Merkle Root, hence it differs from a regular sha256) name for BitTorrent v2 compatible .torrents.
Which already shows some advantages of use of the protocol in user environment, like finding same torrents contents with different names, reviving dead torrents, preserving historical Internet artifacts’ hashes.
The final feature I’m going to release is the ability to download torrents without duplicates (first time in the history of BitTorrent), saving time, storage and bandwidth. Imagine downloading site, page dumps, libraries, video/photo archives and other uncategorized materials without duplicate files.
Easily finding how much user storage specific game and its developers wasted due to ineffective coding.
This feature is ready, but there are some problems in libtorrent (library that qBittorrent uses), which should be fixed by the next release (this year probably) to make it work.
Hope this will get attention from users and accelerate the switch.
