Isn’t a torrent just, like…directly sharing a file from your PC? What’s all this business about “seeding” and “leeching”?
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It’s a special type of direct download, and there’s a reason it’s called torrent.
A torrent beaks a file into smaller pieces, let’s say 10.
10 people want to download the file but you’re the only one who has it.
At first, you send each person one unique piece: person 1 gets piece number 1, person 2 gets piece number 2, etc.
This goes very slowly because you are uploading to 10 people at the same time and those people have to share your limited bandwidth.
Once a person receives their piece, they begin sharing it with the other 10 people. Let’s say person 1 has finished downloading piece 1 from you. They will now begin to upload that to the other people.
So person 2 can now download piece number 1 from you *and* from person 1 at the same time, meaning twice as fast. And they can download piece 3 from person 3 at the same time, so three times as fast, and piece 4 from person 4, etc.
So while you only uploaded the entire file once, slowly, 10 people can now download the file simultaneously 10 times as fast!
That’s why it’s called torrent.
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