3. ELI5: Why are torrents best known for pirating? It seems like having speeds that...

ELI5: Why are torrents best known for pirating? It seems like having speeds that fast would be useful in more legitimate businesses as well.

I think you are misunderstanding what a torrent download is.

It has little to do with speed (in the context of the claim of it being a faster method of download : it is not).

All common download protocols (including bittorrent) operate over the TCP protocol, as such they are all limited by the amount of inbound bandwidth you have available.

What you might be confusing is 'in browser downloads' vs 'torrent downloads' which seems to go significantly faster, and this has to do with many factors;

  • swarming (multiple data connections receiving data simultaneously - which by itself is technically useless but since you are competing with other services on your wifi, in general, you will get more than others)

  • multiple sources (torrents being a peer-to-peer download service, you will grab data from multiple network sources, therefor not limiting or bottlenecking at a single server)

etc

All these can be, and often are, overcome through other means for straight downloads - bittorrent offers nothing over other methods except for availability. Being a peer-to-peer download it does not rely on any single server to 'host' the file or pay for the serving bandwidth costs (which if its a popular download can be significant).

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