A blockchain torrent was exactly what i was thinking.
A humble suggestion:
Maybe a brand new install of bitcoin-qt should alert the user that there are other, faster options for a blockchain download (if it's not going to automatically take advantage of those faster options itself).
There's actually no guarantee that it will be faster. The main restriction to initial download speed is CPU processing, and with the torrent, you are delaying the begin of CPU work until the torrent is complete.
I can see that, yes. However in my case I certainly wasn't CPU bound, and I certainly wasn't network bound. I can only conclude I was bound by the rate at which the 5 or 8 nodes I was connected to were willing to pass me the blocks.
Going by the speed of the internet link I was on, if I were to max out the link I would have been able to download the blockchain torrent in under 2 hours (assuming it's under 8Gb, which is nearly the size of my blocks directory). Let's say 4 hours to be pessimistic. I don't know how long it would take to process that file, however even if it were an order of magnitude longer than the couple of minutes that bitcoin-qt takes to start up, we're still talking a significant improvement over the 8+ hour time it took. (And looking at the timestamps on the .dat files in my blocks folder, I think it took closer to 16 hours).
Still, I'm not saying that the .torrent should be the default or only option. I'm not even saying it should be built-in to the client (although that would be nice). Simply a warning with a link to the forum thread would have sufficed in my instance.
