Essentially the title. I was trying to download a file and my colleagues told me that I should use uTorrent. I did some research and figured that this was very popular a while ago, but since then has decreased in popularity. How does it work and why did it decrease in popularity?
In: Technology
The best analogy I’ve found to explain how BitTorrent works to a layman is:
I need a bag of Skittles. There are 1000 pieces in a bag. I ask my closest 1000 friends on the internet to copy/paste a single skittle into my bag. I now have my own full bag of skittles.
Popularity has decreased mainly for two reason:
1. Streaming used to be better and easier. Netflix had it all, then it was just NetFlix, Amazon, and Hulu. Now it’s 50+ streaming platforms and the service quality sucks. People are going back to piracy because it’s a better product. No ads, no 50 different apps, you have it forever.
2. Legal threats. If you live in the US, while it’s rare to get sued — it’s very common for the media company to threaten to sue your ISP, who then sends you an angry letter to stop or they’ll ban you as an Internet customer for 2 years. Every country has different laws, some aggressive, some very lenient. In the US, you theoretically could be sued for $100k per movie downloaded. In say, the Netherlands, download 1000 movies and the max fine total is the equivalent of $500.
You can always just VPN into a lenient country and run your torrents from there if you don’t want those angry letters. Alternatively, run something like qBitTorrent on a permanent VPN connection (VM or Docker image), so you don’t have to keep your entire computer on VPN 24/7 so you don’t get an angry letter.
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