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by derefr
736 days ago
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It does one thing BitTorrent doesn't — you can compose a new CAR file by combining a few new chunks with a bunch of existing chunks. So you don't get the problem where releasing a new version of an archive means nobody's seeding it; and anyone moving over to seeding the new version stops seeding the old version. Instead, the new file is already pre-seeded by all the old version's seeders on all but the new chunks (because they're seeding the chunks, not the file); and the old file stays seeded as the seeders find the new version and seed its blocks too. Really, BitTorrent could do this by making all torrent files a small fixed size and then having "torrent files of a directory of torrent files" where the torrent client knows to queue the sub-torrents as they're discovered+downloaded in the parent torrent. But that's not how any part of the ecosystem works. IPFS is a "do over" that allowed them to fix this. |
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BitTorrent v2 would in theory be able to seed individual files even if they come from a different torrent. But clients have no reasonable way to look for other versions of a torrent that contain a file they already have.
The main Bittorrent clients already support creating and seeding v2 torrent. But there's just no infrastructure for seeding at the individual file level.