BiglyBT Supports BitTorrent v2
BiglyBT is an open-source client launched in 2017 by Parg and TuxPaper, who earlier worked at Azureus and Vuze respectively. Their creation of BiglyBT has many references to old BitTorrent projects since the creators have set old-fashioned features.
BiglyBT Supports BitTorrent v2Hybrid and v2 TorrentsPer-file Hashing
It has been improved over the years, and the new version launched gets support for the latest BitTorrent v2 protocol. While this wasn’t noticed much by the users, the v2 specification is seen as a key upgrade by developers. First proposed by Bram Cohen in 2008, it was improved and launched finally in September this year. While Libtorrent library, the one which is used by Deluge, UTorrent web, and qBittorrent clients for downloading torrents, has also received support for the v2 specification but wasn’t functional yet. While these may make it work, BiglyBT has already won the race by launching its new version. Here’s how it’s helpful;
Hybrid and v2 Torrents
Usage of the new specification means creating a new swarm of torrents. The v2 specification creates a separate new swarm of torrent files, which have a stronger and different hash from the actual v1 swarm files. The usage of the new hash (SHA-256) helps to decrease collisions and decreased metadata size due to the revised metadata structure.
Per-file Hashing
The new v2 specification creates separate hashes for each file in the torrent, unlike the earlier v1 specification. This is helpful to identify the files by matching hashes, instead of the old-style matching by file sizes. Aside from a better swarm merging, the actual benefit it to verifying the files. Users can identify and thwart any bad files received, like polluted files from mischief users of corrupted while downloading, since only a small amount of data can be dumped after verifying them. While BiglyBT is already ready to support this new specification, we expect this change to happen in a slow manner. Since there are numerous users needed to be knowing the new specification and creating files based on v2. Also, there is a number of torrent clients that should be upgraded to support the new BitTorrent v2 specification as BiglyBT did.
