“How many people still use BitTorrent today is unknown. The days of it making up a third of all internet traffic are clearly over, with one estimate suggesting that it now contributes less to residential upstream traffic than iCloud and FaceTime.

BitTorrent Inc., the company cofounded by Cohen and now owned by Sun, claims that its clients still have 54 million monthly users. Popular third-party clients like Transmission, BiglyBT, and qBittorrent likely attract millions more.

I know what you download, a website that tracks usage across multiple torrent sites, estimates that about 0.25 percent of all internet users download torrents on any given day. “The number of torrent users [has been] pretty stable over the last eight years,” says the site’s admin, Andrey Rogov. Data Rogov shared with The Verge shows Russia, where Netflix and other streaming services aren’t legally available due to sanctions related to the Ukraine war, as BitTorrent’s biggest market. The United States ranks second.

Engling doesn’t have any data on the total usage of Opentracker, but he does at times look at the publicly available reporting dashboards of popular torrent trackers running his software. That data suggests we may be seeing a resurgence. “In absolute numbers, it has gotten more,” he says.

One reason? Streaming is getting awfully expensive these days.”

https://www.theverge.com/tech/959848/bittorrent-story-25-years-piracy

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