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I'm a newby in these topics. I'm pretty sure that bittorrent has worked in ipv6 for a long time now; actually, I find it unintuitive that it would care whether one or the other is used. Also, doesn't bittorrent work fine without port forwarding? I'm pretty sure that I used to run it that way for a long time when my ISP didn't give me a public IP.

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It works, but the number of peers and speeds decrease a lot. At least in my experience. I haven't deep knowledge on how the protocol works.

Port forwarding will allow you to receive connections from clients that are themselves behind NATs, and would also allow you to participate in DHT which would allow you to discover clients faster.

Though in ideal cases (ones with high active seeders), that isn't going to affect performance that much. Torrent can also use UDP hole punching, but that can sometimes be finnicky behind CGNATs

Correct. At least one side must have an open port. So if that's you you can peer with everyone instead of only people with open ports.

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