Popcorn Time != BitTorrent, though. The way Popcorn Time and other BT streaming clients does torrenting is pretty bad for the the overall swarm health — everyone is seeding and leeching the beginning but availability deteriorates the deeper you go. My BT client of choice, Transmission, explicitly rejected the idea of getting chunks sequentially (you have to patch the source yourself if you really want to do that). So, if you can, contribute to swarm health by downloading with a traditional client upfront. And seed to a reasonable ratio, of course.

With far more people's download speed being much higher than the data rate of the content, this matters far less. Sure, you are downloading some blocks from the start of the file, but you are also getting blocks from the middle and end of the file at the same time, which you can exchange with other users tit for tat.

Also, the benefits of tit for tat sharing to prevent Leachers are also less important - with more people having faster internet, there isnt anymore the "everyone wants to download far more than they can be bothered to upload" issue.

With the exception of popular torrents (where swarm health is usually a non-issue), most of the time download speed is limited by the number of seeders and their upload speeds, not the leechers’ download speeds. The problem arises when all leechers request the beginning of an old and/or obscure torrent from one or few leechers.

> there isnt anymore the "everyone wants to download far more than they can be bothered to upload" issue.

There’s the “people quit their BT client as soon as they finish their download” problem which faster internet doesn’t solve.

> The problem arises when all leechers request the beginning of an old and/or obscure torrent from one or few leechers.

If the sending client prioritizes data to clients requesting rare blocks, that problem is solved. It will also give clients an incentive to download the rarest blocks first to keep the swarm healthy.

Are there any VPNs that support the throughput speeds many consumers have access to these days? I have my client set to a 10:1 ratio, but rarely will a file actually reach that because I don't want to leave my slow VPN online for that long degrading my performance for other online tasks.

I've used commercial VPN with acceptable (think ~100Mbps) but not amazing throughput.

But for BT I just set up a secondary on-demand network interface on my Linux server specifically for OpenVPN (just need a shell script to add a couple ip(8) rules, and stick that shell script into the up command of ovpn config). Then I bind my transmission-daemon to that specific interface (bind-address-ipv4 option). This way all BT traffic goes through OpenVPN, but other traffic is not affected. Works for any OpenVPN provider.

This sounds fantastic, thanks for the idea and explanation!

You can use split tunnelling or linux network namespaces to keep the VPN running at all times, but with only your torrent client‘s network connection going through it.

Some VPN companies also provide apps with the feature built-in.

Transmission does allow you to set a priority, so for multi episode series (or albums) you can get the first file and play it while the others are still downloading. But random chunks is fine after that.

It seems better to have 1 availability for the first 95%, than 5% random black holes at random intervals throughout the movie.

It’s about having a uniform 100% instead of four people stuck at the first 25%.

"Mum, I only read Playboy for the articles!"

I'm gay and have a Playboy. The one with the richard dawkins interview.

Shit, I should've thought of that excuse.