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Comment by KennyBlanken | Hacker News Reader

A bunch of open-source projects would like to use v2 torrents, but because Transmission is so popular and has zero support for v2, nobody can use them. Transmission's dev team hasn't said a word on the matter, ever, in four years:

https://github.com/transmission/transmission/issues/458

Elsewhere someone quipped:

> That transmission bug is 4 years old and they've never announced plans to prioritize it (granted the effort is surprisingly high; they've never allowed empty dict keys in bencoding). I think either they either don't know or don't care that their market share makes them an adoption blocker.

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In the beginning I used µTorrent, until it got fucked by whatever company that bought it. It was easily the fastest and most resource-smart client I've ever used. After that I tried a bunch, Deluge, Transmission, Azure and plenty more, but only qBittorrent seems to be a suitable replacement (and is open source as well). Now it has BitTorrent V2 support too :) You should really give it a try.

Ironically, the company that bought µTorrent was BitTorrent, Inc[1]. They're the geniuses also responsible for forking IPFS, renaming it to "BTFS", and not acknowledging IPFS as an upstream in any way[2].

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rainberry,_Inc.

2. https://twitter.com/juanbenet/status/1250634833258143744

Wow, that's a bummer, had no idea the people behind the hollowing out and filling with shit of µTorrent include the actual creator of the protocol itself.

If it makes you feel any better about it, that tweet thread is from 2020, and the actual creator of the protocol itself hasn't worked there in a day to day capacity since 2017.[0]

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bram_Cohen

It makes me not worry about this BTFS thing, but utorrent going bad was around 2010.

BTFS is the product of an entirely different group of people than the ones who were responsible for the uTorrent purchase. BitTorrent Inc was itself bought by cryptocurrency company TRON in 2018. Few people who worked at BT Inc prior to the acquisition are still there, and AFAIK none of them ever worked on BTFS.

Different team of people, all working in the same company, correct?

Technically yes, but as is typical with an acquisition there's residual divide between projects which originated from the BT Inc side of the company and those from the TRON side. BTFS is very much a product of the TRON side despite using the BitTorrent branding.

qBT also has a nice WebUI that has feature parity with the desktop version (or at least near enough that I don't miss anything), which is very useful. Other clients (e.g. Transmission) do too, but I like qBT the most here.

I agree, I put it on an rpi and it works great from any computer/phone in the house that way :)

I just use the version of µTorrent before the company was sold.

Some private trackers require updated software in order to connect to them. And also, you're vulnerable to bunch of security issues if you connect to the public internet with a very old µTorrent version. Do you really run a 10+ year old version of µTorrent without any drawbacks?

> Do you really run a 10+ year old version of µTorrent without any drawbacks?

Absolutely.

> I think either they either don't know or don't care that their market share makes them an adoption blocker.

The truth seems to be that between 2014 and mid-2021 the "transmission dev team" was a single (probably part-time) maintainer:

https://github.com/transmission/transmission/graphs/contribu...

Wow I didn't realize transmission had its own implementation of the torrent protocol, I thought they used libtorrent like everyone else. According to a comment on that issue it seems that not only does it not support v2, but it also breaks on opening v2 .torrent files. Lots of torrents are generated manually using qBittorrent, i.e. private trackers, this means that torrents might start breaking for transmission users soon.

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