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The issue is that some countries punish torrenting copyrighted material harshly. Like from fines to prison sentence, harshly. Because its a P2P connection, you're not only a consumer but also a distributor. And your ISP is fully obligated to give up your traffic data to the authorities, if asked. Almost everybody I know, knows a guy who had to pay +$3000 fines for downloading songs or movies trough torrent. The alternatives are hosting sites. But let's be honest, a 1080p fully length movie is upwards of 2GB, and most hosting sites either limit you to 500MB per day or give you a download speed of 100KB/s. Of course you could pay for a premium account, but A, this will leave a paper trail, and B, there are more hosting sites than streaming services, and the prices are somewhat the same. So for people in these countries it is not viable to just pirate everything.
Any VPN instantly solves this problem though?
Over the years i've torrented with no VPN, Tunnelbear, NordVPN, Mozilla VPN, and Proton; i'm pretty sure all of them messed up my torrenting in some way, not necessarily by making the connection slower, but by making some peers invisible and making me invisible to some peers.
And then there was Soulseek, which had me trying and failing to set up port forwarding. It was complicated and still didn't work as well as it would have if i didn't have a VPN.
Incidentally, i do need a VPN to torrent because i've gotten two fine-threatening letters already
I’d go down the route of paying for a seed box with crypto and then using that with a WireGuard tunnel to download via FTP. Any government involved would have to really, really care about me downloading a film here or there to work out who is using this seed box to download things.
I was actually thinking of using I2P, but there may be complications there too and i don't want to get my hopes up too much
I remember Nord premium had P2P servers, but the speeds where horrendous. Somewhere around 10.000 Kbits. downloading something meant that all the other programs that required bandwidth were almost unusable. I just settled on watching stuff through streams in 'meh' quality. Plus, a VPN just obscures your traffic from your ISP. But almost all mainstream VPNs have at some point either been caught or, admitted to keeping and sometimes selling backlogs. They're just as much of a leach on you wallet as any other subscription service.
May i introduce you to mullvad VPN? They have a no log policy(proven in court) and you don't need to send the personal information for signup. If you want you can even pay them by dumping a letter with your account ID and 5€ in their mail box. Or crypto.
I use AirVPN since Mullvad removed port forwarding
Lots of countries just don't care about you downloading pirated content though, they just punish distribution.
I don't really have that problem but for the places that do punish downloading, I hear VPNs can be helpful to mask your traffic and that ISPs don't really care enough to pursue as long as you're not blatant about it and have plausible deniability ("no, I just downloaded a linux ISO that happened to be exactly the size of a whole season of <insert show>, total coincidence")
Obviously not legal advice though.