I will offer this as a torrent and also give direct-download links to those who wish to jump-start and seed such a torrent, since my seeding speed is limited. The question is, should an official torrent going forward be a compressed file? Using the highest compression preset with
xz/lzma (installed with most distros, opens with 7-zip or
MacOS GUI tools) saves 2GB of downloading, so I say yes:
02/10/2013 08:44 PM 2,841,903,993 bootstrap.dat.lzma
Also, bootstrap.dat is too big for FAT32, but not the compressed version. Bitcoin 0.9+ could even (feature request) open a compressed bootstrap (lzma is a stream container) directly if standardized.
This would make a useful contribution to this thread,
[BETA] Bitcoin blockchain torrent
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=117982.0The semi-official bootstrap.dat torrent is about to be updated, as it is for each bitcoin release. The 2GB issue has already been raised in that thread, and the FAT32 4GB issue would also be a good one to raise.
Ideally we would like everyone to seed the same torrent -- it's the same data, as guaranteed by bitcoin (as well as torrent) hashes.