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Comment by armitron | Hacker News Reader

A v2-aware client that also supported v1 and hybrid torrents would tick all boxes and be able to participate in multiple swarms (for the same torrent).

The main issue that I see is the existence of millions of torrents in private trackers that would have to be manually updated for v2.

Are people going to bother? I think not. So for me, v2 is practically a new-torrents-only affair.

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I think this is fine. Slow migration is often the right choice. The important part is to start early, and in a decade maybe the vast majority of torrents will be V2.

The sites could perform a bulk update for all their torrents if they so chose.

To update you need the data so you can rehash it. A typical tracker only has the torrent files and would take a very long time and spend a lot of possibly expensive bandwidth to download all the tracked torrents. And some torrents may not be seeded all the time.

If nobody has the data, the torrent is effectively dead and most private trackers will remove it in time. If it's not dead, they can incentivize seeders to re-hash/re-upload a v2 compatible torrent if they really wanted to.

Private trackers tend to gamify quite a few aspects of their sites (obvious example being the seed ratio itself).

They often just have the magnet links. I haven't looked into how that works, but I think the complete data is only on the seeders' machines, and the torrent propagates through DHT.

Private trackers do not use magnet links afaik.

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