On July 2, 2001, little-known programmer Bram Cohen wrote to the participants of the mailings for peer developers of peers that his new BitTorrent program was already working, and offered to look at the result. The question about the appointment of the program Cohen did not answer. A few years later, millions of users, copyright holders, ISPs and courts around the world knew the answer.
BitTorrent solved a simple but painful task for the early Internet. The more popular a large file became, the more the load on the server from which it was downloaded grew. Cohen turned the usual scheme. The program divided the file into small parts, after which users simultaneously received fragments from different computers and immediately distributed already uploaded data to other participants.
As a result, the popularity of the file did not interfere with the load, but helped her. Each new participant added its own communication channel to the network. The owner of the source server no longer needed to serve thousands of downloads on his own. This scheme was called “a swarm” because many computers were jointly collected and distributed one set of data. The integrity of each fragment was checked by the hash, so the damaged or supplanted parts could be detected before the loading was completed.
Cohen built a mechanism of mutual exchange into the protocol. The client more willingly sent data to users who also participated in the distribution. BitTorrent thus struggled with the desire to just download and give nothing. Some restrictions made it possible not to overload the channel with dozens of simultaneous shipments and periodically check new participants who can provide higher speed.
At the beginning of the zero peer-to-peer networks already existed. Napster, Kazaa, Grokster, LimeWire and other services helped search for music, movies and programs on other people's computers. Centralized directories and own search engines simultaneously made such systems convenient and vulnerable. The owners of the services knew what materials users were looking for, managed a significant part of the infrastructure and became an obvious goal for copyright holders.
BitTorrent did not contain a built-in catalog of films or music. The program was responsible only for data transmission, and it was necessary to look for the necessary distributions on third-party sites. A small file with the .torrent extension stored the technical description of the contents and the address of the tracker. The tracker did not transmit the film or the program, but only introduced computers interested in one set of data. Such an architecture separated the protocol developer from directories, users and distributed materials, significantly complicating the legal attack on BitTorrent itself.
The first users did not necessarily infringe copyright. The Etree community used BitTorrent to exchange concert recordings of bands that allowed fans to freely distribute performances. Large audio files were difficult to place on conventional servers, and the peer-to-peer network was handled without expensive infrastructure. The real explosion of popularity began later, when BitTorrent began to massively distribute anime, films and TV series.
In 2002, the Suprnova website appeared, and a year later, The Pirate Bayt was launched in Sweden. Such catalogs have turned a technical protocol into an affordable mass tool. The user no longer needed to understand the device of peer networks. It was enough to find the name, open a file or link and wait for the download.
By 2004, BitTorrent’s share estimates reached a third of all Internet traffic. The exact figures differed depending on the country, operator and the method of calculation, but the scale could no longer be ignored. Film studios and music companies closed individual sites and trackers, but copies quickly appeared in their place. Even high-profile trials simultaneously served as advertising and introduced new users to the torrents.
Rapid growth almost strangled the infrastructure. One of the popular trackers worked on a regular computer in a Berlin apartment and received hundreds of requests per second. German developer Dirk Engling wrote a more productive program Opentracker, which could serve thousands of requests even on weak equipment. Engling published the source code, after which Opentracker began to apply large torrent sites, including The Pirate Bay. The project continues to develop after almost two decades, and the first formal version 1.0 was released in January 2025.
The technological revolution grew, but it turned out to be much more difficult to make money on it. In 2004, Cohen founded BitTorrent Inc. The company raised $8.75 million, and then another $20 million. Investors expected to turn a huge audience into a lucrative market for legal digital content.
In 2006, BitTorrent Inc. acquired a popular μTorrent customer, which was valued for its small size and low consumption of resources. The purchase gave the company direct access to a significant part of the audience, but did not solve the main problem. Users linked the name BitTorrent with free downloads and were in no hurry to pay for legal copies.
In 2007, the company opened the BitTorrent Entertainment Network with films and TV series Warner Bros., Paramount, MGM and other studios. The catalog consisted of thousands of names protected by digital rights management. Buyers were offered to pay for materials that were often launched only on Windows and remained available for limited time.
The model quickly failed. Free pirated copies looked more convenient than official files with restrictions. Contracts with the studios also provided for guaranteed payments, so BitTorrent Inc. spent millions of dollars even on weak sales. The store was closed in 2008, after which the company reduced a significant part of the employees.
Later, BitTorrent Inc. tried to sell data delivery technologies, launched a secure messenger, a platform for authors and peer-to-peer broadcasts. No other direction has become a large sustainable business. Advertisements and additional programs in the installers brought money, but at the same time worsened the reputation of customers and annoyed users.
The copyright holders, meanwhile, switched from the developers of the protocol to catalogs, owners of trackers and users themselves. Closing a single server rarely stopped the distribution. Computers continued to exchange the parts already received, and the catalog could be restored from a backup on another domain. Trackers also did not store films or programs themselves, since they processed only the hashes and network addresses of the participants.
Further decentralization made central servers even less mandatory. The distributed HDT hash table allowed customers to look for participants without a traditional tracker. Magnetic links have saved sites from having to store .torrent files, as the client could get the metadata directly from other network members.
The protocol continued to develop after the end of the era of mass torrent catalogs. The second version of the format received the hashing of SHA2-256 and Merkla trees to check individual files. Thanks to extensions, modern customers can work with trackers, DHT, magnetic links and direct exchange of information between participants.
Piracy overshadowed the legal capabilities of BitTorrent, although the protocol was never limited to films and music. Ubuntu developers still offer official images of the operating system through torrents, since this method often speeds up and stabilizes the loading of large files. Internet Archive also supports its own trackers and distributes books, music, music, and archival materials available for free download through BitTorrent.
In 2018, BitTorrent came under control of the TRON blockchain project, founded by Justin San. The amount was not officially disclosed, but sources estimated the deal at about $ 140 million. The new owner has linked the well-known brand with the BTT token and decentralized storage services.
The exact audience of the protocol can not be determined now. BitTorrent Inc. claims about 54 million monthly active users. A few more million can work through independent clients of qBittorrent, Transmission, BiglyBT and other programs. The share of torrent traffic is much lower than the peak indicators of the zero, but the network has not disappeared and, according to the operators of large trackers, has been growing again in recent years. One of the reasons is the rise in price of streaming subscriptions and the fragmentation of films and series between many incompatible platforms.
Cohen himself has long left the company and focused on the blockchain project Chia Network. The creator of BitTorrent admits that he sought to start a revolution, not build a corporation. The revolution was much better than business. The protocol has experienced websites, lawsuits, raids, closures of companies and a change of owners, proving that data can be distributed without a single center. Together with the technological heritage of BitTorrent left the industry a more unpleasant lesson. When the convenience of an illegal product exceeds legal offers, it is almost impossible to return users by banning.
BitTorrent solved a simple but painful task for the early Internet. The more popular a large file became, the more the load on the server from which it was downloaded grew. Cohen turned the usual scheme. The program divided the file into small parts, after which users simultaneously received fragments from different computers and immediately distributed already uploaded data to other participants.
As a result, the popularity of the file did not interfere with the load, but helped her. Each new participant added its own communication channel to the network. The owner of the source server no longer needed to serve thousands of downloads on his own. This scheme was called “a swarm” because many computers were jointly collected and distributed one set of data. The integrity of each fragment was checked by the hash, so the damaged or supplanted parts could be detected before the loading was completed.
Cohen built a mechanism of mutual exchange into the protocol. The client more willingly sent data to users who also participated in the distribution. BitTorrent thus struggled with the desire to just download and give nothing. Some restrictions made it possible not to overload the channel with dozens of simultaneous shipments and periodically check new participants who can provide higher speed.
At the beginning of the zero peer-to-peer networks already existed. Napster, Kazaa, Grokster, LimeWire and other services helped search for music, movies and programs on other people's computers. Centralized directories and own search engines simultaneously made such systems convenient and vulnerable. The owners of the services knew what materials users were looking for, managed a significant part of the infrastructure and became an obvious goal for copyright holders.
BitTorrent did not contain a built-in catalog of films or music. The program was responsible only for data transmission, and it was necessary to look for the necessary distributions on third-party sites. A small file with the .torrent extension stored the technical description of the contents and the address of the tracker. The tracker did not transmit the film or the program, but only introduced computers interested in one set of data. Such an architecture separated the protocol developer from directories, users and distributed materials, significantly complicating the legal attack on BitTorrent itself.
The first users did not necessarily infringe copyright. The Etree community used BitTorrent to exchange concert recordings of bands that allowed fans to freely distribute performances. Large audio files were difficult to place on conventional servers, and the peer-to-peer network was handled without expensive infrastructure. The real explosion of popularity began later, when BitTorrent began to massively distribute anime, films and TV series.
In 2002, the Suprnova website appeared, and a year later, The Pirate Bayt was launched in Sweden. Such catalogs have turned a technical protocol into an affordable mass tool. The user no longer needed to understand the device of peer networks. It was enough to find the name, open a file or link and wait for the download.
By 2004, BitTorrent’s share estimates reached a third of all Internet traffic. The exact figures differed depending on the country, operator and the method of calculation, but the scale could no longer be ignored. Film studios and music companies closed individual sites and trackers, but copies quickly appeared in their place. Even high-profile trials simultaneously served as advertising and introduced new users to the torrents.
Rapid growth almost strangled the infrastructure. One of the popular trackers worked on a regular computer in a Berlin apartment and received hundreds of requests per second. German developer Dirk Engling wrote a more productive program Opentracker, which could serve thousands of requests even on weak equipment. Engling published the source code, after which Opentracker began to apply large torrent sites, including The Pirate Bay. The project continues to develop after almost two decades, and the first formal version 1.0 was released in January 2025.
The technological revolution grew, but it turned out to be much more difficult to make money on it. In 2004, Cohen founded BitTorrent Inc. The company raised $8.75 million, and then another $20 million. Investors expected to turn a huge audience into a lucrative market for legal digital content.
In 2006, BitTorrent Inc. acquired a popular μTorrent customer, which was valued for its small size and low consumption of resources. The purchase gave the company direct access to a significant part of the audience, but did not solve the main problem. Users linked the name BitTorrent with free downloads and were in no hurry to pay for legal copies.
In 2007, the company opened the BitTorrent Entertainment Network with films and TV series Warner Bros., Paramount, MGM and other studios. The catalog consisted of thousands of names protected by digital rights management. Buyers were offered to pay for materials that were often launched only on Windows and remained available for limited time.
The model quickly failed. Free pirated copies looked more convenient than official files with restrictions. Contracts with the studios also provided for guaranteed payments, so BitTorrent Inc. spent millions of dollars even on weak sales. The store was closed in 2008, after which the company reduced a significant part of the employees.
Later, BitTorrent Inc. tried to sell data delivery technologies, launched a secure messenger, a platform for authors and peer-to-peer broadcasts. No other direction has become a large sustainable business. Advertisements and additional programs in the installers brought money, but at the same time worsened the reputation of customers and annoyed users.
The copyright holders, meanwhile, switched from the developers of the protocol to catalogs, owners of trackers and users themselves. Closing a single server rarely stopped the distribution. Computers continued to exchange the parts already received, and the catalog could be restored from a backup on another domain. Trackers also did not store films or programs themselves, since they processed only the hashes and network addresses of the participants.
Further decentralization made central servers even less mandatory. The distributed HDT hash table allowed customers to look for participants without a traditional tracker. Magnetic links have saved sites from having to store .torrent files, as the client could get the metadata directly from other network members.
The protocol continued to develop after the end of the era of mass torrent catalogs. The second version of the format received the hashing of SHA2-256 and Merkla trees to check individual files. Thanks to extensions, modern customers can work with trackers, DHT, magnetic links and direct exchange of information between participants.
Piracy overshadowed the legal capabilities of BitTorrent, although the protocol was never limited to films and music. Ubuntu developers still offer official images of the operating system through torrents, since this method often speeds up and stabilizes the loading of large files. Internet Archive also supports its own trackers and distributes books, music, music, and archival materials available for free download through BitTorrent.
In 2018, BitTorrent came under control of the TRON blockchain project, founded by Justin San. The amount was not officially disclosed, but sources estimated the deal at about $ 140 million. The new owner has linked the well-known brand with the BTT token and decentralized storage services.
The exact audience of the protocol can not be determined now. BitTorrent Inc. claims about 54 million monthly active users. A few more million can work through independent clients of qBittorrent, Transmission, BiglyBT and other programs. The share of torrent traffic is much lower than the peak indicators of the zero, but the network has not disappeared and, according to the operators of large trackers, has been growing again in recent years. One of the reasons is the rise in price of streaming subscriptions and the fragmentation of films and series between many incompatible platforms.
Cohen himself has long left the company and focused on the blockchain project Chia Network. The creator of BitTorrent admits that he sought to start a revolution, not build a corporation. The revolution was much better than business. The protocol has experienced websites, lawsuits, raids, closures of companies and a change of owners, proving that data can be distributed without a single center. Together with the technological heritage of BitTorrent left the industry a more unpleasant lesson. When the convenience of an illegal product exceeds legal offers, it is almost impossible to return users by banning.
