You are right it could be done client side but it would have to then add a negotiation to determine if its even possible if your client is to be backwards compatible, youd probably have to use timeout as a failure; or maintain a list of clients but I think that method is messy. There are quite a few problems with the Torrent protocol, it could use a rewrite and I don’t say that lightly; I mean I use xmpp and smtp and ssh all the time, I like to keep it simple but the person who runs the project too is a lil wacky.

But the protocol itself has tons of efficiency, they are very slow to add new features and ideally youd want there to be a negotation in place to ask about compression otherwise you have to rely on timeeouts; which is a viable strategy.

For example do mutable torrents exist yet? Because that would be very nice functionality, especially if mutability control was tied to keys, and then you could do some interesting multisignature stuff to control mutability of the torrent.

But another reason I think the protocol needs an update is their merkle tree design could be massively improved by simply not using a static block size; beyond the fact it creates a very noticeable fingerprint, I mean the key developer doesn’t like pirates and a lot of kids had their lives fuckd because the developer never bothered to make the traffic difficult to find even when encrypted.

I been meaning to make a client with a tracker, to see how that works in this protocol. I’m thinking like it could make it so everyone could share their stuff easier; and would probably want an onion address for discovery (at least that would be easy.

I would like to be helpful to the leftist podcast listeners sometime and write a torrent downloader to download the kingdex podcasts in hard to get torrents and present it as an RSS for them; like a abstraction or a shim.

anyways im still not feeling all that well, take care