Once a peer has acquired the entirety of the file, they stop being a consumer and become known as a “seeder.” Instead of directly downloading the entirety of a file from a single source within the network, BitTorrent breaks the file into multiple little pieces and spreads the pieces out to “peers.” Every peer who has a piece of the file on their device is a member of the “swarm.”Įach swarm member simultaneously uploads and downloads pieces of the file, effectively exchanging them with one another. This is largely due to some key innovations of the protocol, namely swarms and trackers. Today, BitTorrent dominates the P2P landscape. Using Napster as an example, users would make folders directly available to the network, with any downloader connecting directly to the source and downloading it in its entirety from there. Only in the mid 1990s, with the commercialization of the internet, do we see the shift to the server-client model that’s so prevalent today.Įarly file-sharing networks like Napster were also based on peer-to-peer networks, but with significant differences to the now dominant BitTorrent. In fact, early versions of the internet were inherently designed as peer-to-peer systems, with concepts like firewalls only emerging in the late 1980s. With a server-client model, the user (aka the client) acts only as a consumer, connecting to a single or limited number of servers that supply resources or files.Īlthough BitTorrent is by far the most famous P2P protocol, it’s far from the only one out there. Peer-to-peer networks operate in a decentralized way, meaning that instead of connecting to a single centralized server, users form an interconnected web of “peers.” Depending on what the network is used for, tasks or data are spread across the peers, with each one acting as both a consumer and a supplier.Ī good way to understand the concept of a peer-to-peer network is to contrast it with the traditional server-client model. In order to understand what torrenting is, and particularly how it works, it’s necessary to have a working definition of peer-to-peer (or P2P for short) file-sharing. Torrenting refers to the process of downloading files using BitTorrent, which is a decentralized peer-to-peer file sharing protocol. In this section, we will explain the basics of torrenting and the terms you need to know to understand how it works. What Is Torrenting and How Does Torrenting Work? With the exception of major server hosts and distributors, as far as we could find, there are no examples of people going to jail for activities related to torrenting. We’re not lawyers, but it’s extremely unlikely - bordering on unheard of - to go to jail simply for downloading torrents. If you don’t care about the nitty-gritty technical details, check out our guide on how to start torrenting or our qBittorrent vs uTorrent comparison and best torrent sites instead. In order to answer what torrenting is, we’ll have to flesh out some other concepts as well, as there’s no way to understand what torrenting means on a technical level without first going through a bit of a crash-course on some basic terminology. In order to protect yourself from your ISP or copyright holders, make sure to use a VPN to protect yourself.
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