I exclaimed “YES!” and started clapping after reading your comment. Just hell yeah. Beyond the weird issues that come with the model of seeding to gain access, there is something fundamentally off about the idea of private trackers, and you nailed it. It is antithetical to the whole enterprise of sharing. This transactional shit serves as a price tag that only the privileged can afford
Many times that’s true, too. One of the saddest things in torrents is seeing two torrents with identical contents that were created separately, or one just recreated so someone can add their website to it or something, thereby dividing the pool of possible peers.
I think one of the most interesting ideas in BitTorrent v2 is that hash trees are formed per-file, not per-torrent. So two torrents with identical contents could, if I understand this right, basically be considered one and the same. It would be cool to see more wide adoption and promotion of BT v2 https://blog.libtorrent.org/2020/09/bittorrent-v2/
