News 🧨 BitTorrent: The Invention That Saved the Internet (and Pissed Off Hollywood)

[dEEpEst]

BitTorrent: The Invention That Saved the Internet (and Pissed Off Hollywood)

In the early 2000s, the internet was... slow .
Very slow.

One movie - 24 hours of downloading.
One server - hundreds of users, and it crashed.
The more people wanted to download, the slower everything worked.

In the era of mp3 and AVI this was a real problem.
And no one knew how to solve it.

One person. One protocol.

His name is Bram Cohen .
He is an introvert. He suffers from chronic fatigue.
Works several hours a day. But thinks like a genius .

In 2001, alone, he writes what will become
One of the main inventions of the Internet is BitTorrent .

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## How does it work?

Instead of pulling a file from one server,
BitTorrent breaks it into hundreds of little pieces .

The user downloads one piece -
and immediately distributes it to others .

Everyone becomes both a client and a server.
The more people download, the faster the system works.

There are no centers. There is no control.

It was an anti-Internet in a centralized Internet world .
BitTorrent was independent of Google, Amazon, or data centers.
He lived in millions of home computers.

Hollywood is in a panic

The Pirate Bay appears. Torrents fill the forums.
Movies, TV series, music – everything is flying around the world.

American studios lobby for new laws.
Napster , LimeWire , **MegaUpload** are closing…

But BitTorrent cannot be closed .
It is not hosted on a server. It is a protocol .
It is sewn into the very body of the Internet .

The most interesting thing?

Bram Cohen did not become a billionaire.
He didn't start a corporation. He didn't move to Silicon Valley.
He simply gave the world a tool and stepped aside.

He later began developing the Chia cryptocurrency.
But he accomplished the main revolution when he was alone .

BitTorrent is not about piracy

It was a protest . It was decentralization .
It was the ancestor of Web3 and peer-to-peer culture.

Today you are updating Ubuntu via torrent.
Download distributions. Distribute large archives.

All this is thanks to one person who
once said:

> _"I just want the internet to work faster."_

Remember this name: Bram Cohen
The man who sped up the entire internet - and remained in the shadows.