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After covering the history of Don Ho and Notepad++, I started thinking about what other similar stories might be worth exploring. The SoftRAM grift of the 90s fit in some ways, but it lacked the human element. That was a corporate grift, not a personal story — and we have no shortage of those. SoftRAM also didn’t have the same broad recognition as Notepad++. I’d wager nearly everyone reading XDA knows Notepad++, while RAM doubler scams were mostly confined to the 1990s.

After some thought, I decided to take a closer look at BitTorrent to see if there was something worth writing about. The story of Bram Cohen and BitTorrent had everything I’d been looking for—a brilliant technical solution to the internet’s limitations at the time, a neurodivergent programmer whose struggles with the business side of creation resonated with my own experience, and unexpected connections stretching from Spotify to Blizzard Entertainment.

My experience with BitTorrent came through the late 1990s and early 2000s independent music scenes. Whether or not you’ve used it, BitTorrent played a larger role in technology and music history than I realized.

File sharing before BitTorrent

Building a music scene through file sharing

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In the late 1990s, early peer-to-peer (P2P) services like Napster changed how music moved across the internet. For the first time, anyone could share their digital library directly with others — a digital version of making mix tapes or burning a CD for a friend. Predictably, instead of adapting to an obviously digital future, the recording industry responded with lawsuits that shut Napster down by 2001. In the vacuum that followed, users did what they always do when official markets fail to deliver — they found other ways around them.

Sharing MP3s was central to my own musical development. Without it, my band’s reach would have been limited to handing out CDs at shows — if we could even book them. Instead, our music spread far beyond what would have been possible just a few years earlier. My band played hundreds of shows across New England and the surrounding states in the few years we were active because the internet made sharing our music simple.

DIY booking became much easier once bands could connect directly. I could reach out to groups I liked, talk with promoters, and send them our album. Bands did the same with me, and I ended up putting together shows for touring acts as well as local friends. Between house shows, basements, school gyms, record stores, Masonic lodges, churches, art galleries, and even a packed shed in someone’s backyard, there was no shortage of places to play as the scene grew.

Credit: Source: Benjamin Zeman

It also connected me with musicians who would later become huge. I hung out with My Chemical Romance in a school gym just as they were releasing I Brought You My Bullets, You Brought Me Your Love, and Gerard Way gave me great advice on stage presence. At the time, it felt casual — just hanging out with other musicians — but in hindsight, it was early access to a band that would become massive. I ended up on a compilation with Thrice and Avenged Sevenfold, who were just other guys from California starting out a few years before us. Geoff Rickly from Thursday gave me some of the best singing advice I’ve ever received while we sat on the sidewalk catching fresh air from a stuffy show.

Looking back, those connections highlight a larger truth. Early-2000s file sharing was more than trading songs online — it reshaped music history by fueling new subgenres, communities, and cultures that left a lasting mark.

Sharing music is human nature, no different from trading mix tapes a decade earlier. What changed was the scale: the internet made it possible to spread entire albums, even catalogs, in ways that inspired more people to create. The more cultural media circulated, the more ideas took root — and the more new scenes began to grow.

Hitting the early limits of file sharing

Those early years of P2P opened doors but also revealed how limited the technology was. On a family computer with a 56k connection, moving even a handful of songs meant leaving transfers running overnight and hoping they didn’t fail. Sometimes there was no way to resume a broken download, and sending or receiving multiple files in batches tested anyone’s patience. Larger files — movies, TV shows, or software — were almost out of reach, and tying up the connection meant watching images load line by line.

BitTorrent was the breakthrough that broke past some of those bandwidth bottlenecks. Suddenly, entire libraries — music discographies, movies, TV shows, even massive book collections — could move freely across the internet. It made sharing early DAWs (Digital Audio Workstations) more common, which meant kids could make music in their bedrooms for the first time, even if it was pirated software. . The surge of access to both tools and inspiration pushed DIY creativity into overdrive, filling the early 2000s with new subgenres and fusion styles. BitTorrent made everything faster and easier to find.

The tension between sharing and control

Of course, all of this came with a catch. Sharing music, movies, TV shows, and software without paying for them was illegal, and the industries behind them fought back with lawsuits and scare tactics. Piracy was everywhere. Remember the iconic “You wouldn’t steal a car” anti-piracy ad campaign? While rumors that its music was pirated were unsubstantiated, there’s compelling evidence the font they used was.

I’m not diving into every angle here — there are countless stories about the legal fights and arguments about the ethics — but it’s important to acknowledge that pirating software and media wasn’t just a quirk of the times. It was a direct challenge to entrenched industries that saw only theft where many of us saw culture and community. I’m not suggesting piracy should be endorsed, but it’s impossible to ignore the cultural impact it had.

What digital media file sharing really exposed was a capitalism problem.

If the arts were valued for what they bring to people rather than commodified to enrich the ultrawealthy, maybe we wouldn’t be having this conversation. The manufactured idea of the “starving artist” persists because wealthy individuals and corporations have helped sustain it, not because art isn’t worth supporting. It’s a convenient way to excuse the poverty and systemic undervaluing of artistic labor that so many artists throughout history have endured.

Sharing feels good — it’s natural to want others to hear the music, read the books, or watch the films that move you. That tension between the joy of sharing and the mechanics of profit made early file sharing both transformative and controversial. Despite the lawsuits, takedowns, and constant pressure, BitTorrent itself survived. It was a protocol — a method of moving data that anyone could use — and that made it untouchable in a way that infuriated the Movie Picture Association of America (MPAA) and Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA).

The birth of BitTorrent protocol

Bram Cohen and the puzzle of distribution

Credit: Source: Flickr - JD Lasica

BitTorrent wasn’t born in a research lab, a corporation, or a government program like many other digital technologies. Bram Cohen grew up in New York City and was already programming computers at age 5 — when most kids were just learning to read simple sentences, count past 10, or play make-believe with friends. While his peers were practicing cursive or playing tag, Cohen was teaching himself BASIC on the family’s Timex Sinclair.

Programming in BASIC at age 5 was extraordinary because it requires abstract symbolic reasoning, understanding logic structures, and manipulating syntax—skills that usually don’t develop until late childhood or adolescence.

Cohen is on the autism spectrum, something that showed itself early in the way he interacted with the world but that he wouldn’t self-diagnose until later in life. He was blunt, hyperfocused, and far more interested in intellectual stimulation than social play. One of his special interests was puzzles — solving and inventing them. Those traits became a defining part of his personality and they helped shape how he approached programming.

At the time, P2P services like Napster relied on central indexes or direct connections that slowed down or failed under heavy demand. Cohen set out to create a system that could distribute files to many users at high speed without overwhelming a server. His solution was decentralization — leveraging the crowd to make data sharing more efficient.

BitTorrent wasn’t about rebellion, piracy, or even the music and movie industries — it was a puzzle to solve. A stripped-down, efficient protocol designed to do one job better than anything that came before it.

Solving the bandwidth bottleneck

Credit: Source: GitHub - TorrentTools

In 2001, Bram Cohen developed Bencoding, a data serialization format — a set of rules for turning structured data (numbers, strings, lists, dictionaries) into a sequence of bytes or characters — specifically for the BitTorrent protocol. He also wrote the first BitTorrent client to encode and decode data within it.

The BitTorrent v1 protocol works by splitting a file into small, fixed-size pieces. A static Bencoded dictionary, called a .torrent file, contains the metadata needed to reassemble those pieces. It lists filenames, sizes, piece lengths, and an SHA-1 hash for each piece to ensure data integrity. It also includes the URLs of trackers, which act as a kind of phonebook listing all connected peers — users sharing pieces of the file.

Bencoding is similar to JSON, which was developed around the same time, but with key differences. Bencoding includes native support for arbitrary binary data — essential for the hash integrity checks — and it’s lightweight and highly efficient.

When a new download begins, each peer generates a random 20-byte ID. In version one of the protocol, a BitTorrent client contacts the tracker’s URL to request a list of available peers and sends information including its peer ID, IP address, listening port, total bytes uploaded and downloaded, remaining bytes, and event status — whether the download has started, completed, or stopped.

While version one and traditional .torrent files remain in use, BitTorrent v2 (BEP 52), introduced major updates: SHA-256–based per-file Merkle trees and a new file tree layout. The infohash is computed over the Bencoded info dictionary using SHA-256 and is often truncated to 20 bytes for trackers and handshakes. Trackers, .torrent files, DHT (Distributed Hash Tables), PEX (Peer Exchange), and Magnet Links all interoperate in v2. Magnet Links can retrieve metainfo directly from the DHT, reducing or even eliminating the need to distribute .torrent files, while DHT provides a fully decentralized way to locate peers and share data. Clients that support DHT participate in a single distributed hash table, routing queries through peers to find content.

The protocol also uses an adaptive system to decide which peers to connect to and which pieces to download first. Clients prioritize rare pieces to keep them from disappearing and continually adjust connections through a tit-for-tat algorithm, favoring peers that upload quickly while dropping slower ones. Every 30 seconds, a process called optimistic unchoking tests new peers to find potentially faster connections. This constant recalibration prevents bottlenecks by spreading requests across dozens or even hundreds of peers at once. The result is a swarm that can fully saturate available bandwidth, delivering large files far faster than traditional downloads ever could.

By mid-2002, Cohen had a working Python client and demonstrated it at CodeCon, a small underground conference he co-founded. What impressed early adopters most was how his free, open protocol turned the internet’s biggest limitation — bandwidth — into an advantage.

Early adoption and rising popularity

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As part of his 2002 push to spread the BitTorrent beta client, Cohen seeded it with pornographic content, betting it would attract users. Pornography has repeatedly driven adoption of new media technologies — printing, photography, film, digital formats, the internet, and now VR and AI. Cohen recognized that leveraging this pattern was an efficient, low-cost way to spread BitTorrent — and it worked.

People quickly began using BitTorrent to share pirated movies, TV shows, music, software, and porn. Tracker sites such as Suprnova, LokiTorrent, and, most famously, The Pirate Bay became central hubs, cataloging torrents and drawing massive audiences. They operated in a legal gray zone — or outright illegally — but advertising revenue gave operators a strong incentive to keep expanding.

The music and movie industries branded BitTorrent “the new Napster.” The MPAA and RIAA poured money into lawsuits, pressuring courts and lawmakers to protect their profits. Investors, meanwhile, saw opportunity. Adoption was rising too quickly to ignore, and BitTorrent fit neatly into the second wave of internet technologies that followed the dot-com crash. Silicon Valley was rebounding with Google’s IPO, the rise of social media, and platforms like YouTube on the horizon. Venture capital was flowing again, and BitTorrent looked like another disruptive tool poised for massive growth.

Capitalism reacted as it always does — legacy industries fought to preserve their cash flow through lawsuits, lobbying, and propaganda, while investors placed bets on what might reshape the market. Creators and users ended up in the middle, punished or exploited no matter who came out ahead.

Ultimately, Cohen was right: “The traditional media business model is doomed to becoming outmoded.”

Cohen was blunt about the futility of DRM and lawsuits but maintained he never used BitTorrent to pirate anything. For him, it was always about solving the distribution problem. Legal use cases were clear from the start — Linux distributions, software updates, and large repositories were far easier to share through BitTorrent than centralized servers. Media companies succeeded in shutting down trackers like Suprnova and LokiTorrent, but they couldn’t kill BitTorrent itself.

Investor interest led Cohen, his brother Ross, and entrepreneur Ashwin Navin to found BitTorrent Inc. in 2004. The company raised $8.75 million in early 2005 from Doll Capital Management, led by David Chao. Later that year, BitTorrent Inc. struck a deal with the MPAA to remove links to pirated material from its official site and search engine. With legacy industries starting to cave, Cohen now faced a new challenge — how to monetize a protocol already synonymous with piracy.

In 2005, YouTube launched, and streaming video emerged as the next way to consume media online. That shift would challenge BitTorrent’s dominance and set the stage for its next chapter, as BitTorrent Inc. struggled to find a monetization model that worked.

BitTorrent’s struggle at commercialization

Early business models and the search for funding

Credit: Source: Flickr - Dick Thomas Johnson

BitTorrent’s challenge after 2005 was turning massive adoption into revenue. Over the next 14 years, the company tested multiple business models but never found one that worked. It didn’t collapse, but it never became profitable either.

Early strategies focused on content distribution—selling digital media, hosting creators, and monetizing through ads and transaction fees. By 2006, BitTorrent had raised more than $30 million across two funding rounds to pursue these ideas.

The first major effort was a marketplace for independent creators to sell large media files such as videos and software. It mirrored the cultural shift already reshaping music. The early 2000s saw a surge of DIY independence as record labels struggled to adapt to digital distribution.

Physical album sales were in free fall, and 2006 brought the closure of Tower Records’ iconic brick-and-mortar stores. Meanwhile, social platforms like MySpace were giving musicians direct access to fans, bypassing traditional gatekeepers. BitTorrent’s plan fit that moment — a low-cost way for creators to share and sell their work directly — but it failed to gain traction, and the company pivoted once again.

BitTorrent’s Spotify connection

BitTorrent acquired µTorrent in 2006, the most widely used torrent client, gaining access to its massive user base. The deal also created an unexpected link to Spotify, which would soon redefine digital music.

At the time, µTorrent was briefly owned by Spotify. The company sold it to BitTorrent just months after acquiring it — not for the software, but for its creator. “Spotify bought µTorrent, but what we really wanted was Ludvig Strigeus,” former Spotify CTO Andreas Ehn told the Swedish newspaper Breakit. Strigeus joined Spotify as a senior programmer and became a key early engineer behind its core streaming technology and desktop client.

While Strigeus didn’t use the BitTorrent protocol, Spotify’s proprietary hybrid streaming model was built on similar principles. It used a BitTorrent-like tracker and a Gnutella-like network that distributed playback across servers, local cache, and peer connections. When a user played a track, it could stream from Spotify’s servers, cached files, or other subscribers through peer-to-peer. This design achieved ultra-low latency — an average of about 265 milliseconds — which was groundbreaking at the time and proved that streaming media was viable.

In Spotify’s early years, less than 10 percent of data came directly from its servers. Roughly 35 percent came from the P2P network and about 55 percent from cached data. By 2011, around 80 percent of Spotify’s total traffic still relied on peer-to-peer networking. Combined with the profit from selling µTorrent, these bandwidth savings helped Spotify scale quickly. By 2014, as storage and data centers became cheaper and faster, Spotify phased out P2P entirely and moved to centralized streaming.

While Spotify proved that peer-to-peer networking could be commercialized and legitimized, BitTorrent continued to struggle. The company that had invented the concept still hadn’t found a way to make it profitable — and streaming was becoming its biggest competition.

Pivots, failures, and the long decline

In 2007, BitTorrent launched the BitTorrent Entertainment Network, an online store for licensed movies and music designed to compete with Apple’s iTunes and Amazon’s new digital platforms. The timing made sense — physical album sales were collapsing, U.S. album sales fell 9.5 percent that year, and digital sales grew 53 percent — but the storefront failed to gain traction and shut down within a year.

Cohen stepped down as CEO and became chief scientist while new leadership took over. Around the same time, a few prominent musicians began to embrace BitTorrent as a platform for creative distribution rather than a threat. In 2007, Nine Inch Nails frontman Trent Reznor released several tracks from Year Zero through BitTorrent. The download included high-quality audio and multitrack stems for fans to remix — an ideal use case given the large file sizes.

BitTorrent Inc. remained operational but continued to lose money. In 2008, after another funding round fell short, the company returned $17 million to investors to recapitalize at a lower valuation. President Ashwin Navin soon left. Through the 2010s, BitTorrent experimented with monetization strategies — embedding ads in µTorrent, selling premium versions, launching file-syncing software like BitTorrent Sync, and pitching the protocol as a low-cost solution for large-scale enterprise data distribution.

Credit: Source: BitTorrent.com Blog

None of these efforts succeeded, though each made strategic sense. They aligned with trends in ad-supported software, premium upgrades, cloud storage, and enterprise data management. BitTorrent made smart pivots that followed the market but never managed to turn its massive reach into a sustainable business.

In 2018, BitTorrent Inc. was acquired by the blockchain company TRON, which aimed to integrate BitTorrent into its cryptocurrency ecosystem and use µTorrent’s 100-million-plus users to promote the BitTorrent Token (BTT). The sale marked the end of BitTorrent as an independent company. Cohen left soon after, closing the chapter on a project that transformed global file sharing but never achieved lasting commercial success.

Legitimate uses and major integrations of BitTorrent

BitTorrent as a general-purpose protocol for moving data

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Even though BitTorrent Inc. never found a sustainable business model, the protocol itself became one of the most widely adopted ways to move large files across the internet. Its reach extended far beyond piracy. Many open-source projects and Linux distributions offer official torrents for downloading installation images and updates. For a time, Common Crawl — the open data alternative to Google’s proprietary search index — distributed its massive web archives via torrents, and the Internet Archive still provides BitTorrent downloads for its extensive media collections.

Universities also adopted the protocol for research and software distribution. Projects under Berkeley’s BOINC platform used BitTorrent to deliver software updates to volunteer computers participating in distributed computing. Florida State University shared large scientific datasets through internal torrent networks, while other institutions maintained specialized trackers for academic publications and open datasets. Even the British government used BitTorrent to distribute large public data releases, including detailed spending records, allowing journalists and citizens to download them directly without overwhelming government servers.

Traditional broadcasters experimented with it as well. In 2008, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) became one of the first major North American broadcasters to release an official torrent — an episode of Canada’s Next Great Prime Minister — shortly after it aired on television.

The last wave of torrent-era media before streaming took over

Credit: Source: Flickr - PabloBM

In 2008, Nine Inch Nails pushed BitTorrent into the cultural spotlight with the release of Ghosts I–IV, distributed directly to fans on public trackers like The Pirate Bay. The band made the first volume, Ghosts I, freely available as part of a four-volume collection — its first major release after leaving Interscope Records in 2007. In the release notes, the band wrote: “Now that we’re no longer constrained by a record label, we’ve decided to personally upload Ghosts I … because we believe BitTorrent is a revolutionary digital distribution method, and we believe in finding ways to utilize new technologies instead of fighting them.”

The release included a noncommercial Creative Commons license encouraging fans to share it freely. When the band’s servers buckled under demand, torrents carried the load, and Ghosts I became one of the most downloaded files on The Pirate Bay. Later that year, NIN followed with The Slip, another free Creative Commons release. The band published multitrack stems for every song, inviting fans to remix and redistribute their work.

Reznor said what most wouldn’t: “If OiNK cost anything, I would certainly have paid, but there isn’t the equivalent of that in the retail space right now.” It was a simple truth — when industries refuse to adapt, black markets take over.

As streaming took over, Bram Cohen kept pushing forward. He developed BitTorrent Live, a peer-to-peer protocol for live video designed to solve one of streaming’s biggest problems: latency. Traditional live streams could lag by up to a minute; Cohen’s system cut that delay to about five seconds while distributing bandwidth costs among viewers. The result was a more scalable, efficient way to stream large live events — sports, concerts, breaking news — to millions at minimal cost.

But despite its potential, BitTorrent Live never reached mainstream adoption. As Cohen refined the technology through the early 2010s, Content Delivery Networks (CDNs) and cloud platforms like Amazon Web Services were rapidly becoming the backbone of online media. Storage was cheaper, broadband faster, and centralized streaming offered something torrents couldn’t — instant access without waiting for downloads.

Enterprise and infrastructure applications

Credit: Source: G2A

As mainstream use of torrenting declined, the protocol’s core technology quietly became part of the internet’s infrastructure. Game studios, tech companies, and cloud platforms built on BitTorrent’s open protocol to move massive files efficiently, modifying it to suit their own systems and scale.

Blizzard Entertainment integrated a custom BitTorrent client into its downloader for games like World of Warcraft, allowing millions of players to receive patches simultaneously without overwhelming its servers. The same logic spread across Silicon Valley. Facebook used BitTorrent to distribute software builds across its global data centers, and Twitter implemented a similar approach to manage updates for its production servers.

Even Amazon built BitTorrent support directly into its cloud. For years, Amazon Web Services (AWS) let users download publicly shared S3 files via BitTorrent, offloading bandwidth and reducing strain on servers. Ironically, that same cloud infrastructure — and the rise of Content Delivery Networks (CDNs) built on top of it — would later make BitTorrent itself largely unnecessary.

BitTorrent’s open protocol made it freely available to anyone, ensuring its success but eliminating any real control. Other companies built on its open-source foundation to cut costs and increase efficiency, while BitTorrent, Inc. couldn’t charge for something the world could already use for free.

The lessons of BitTorrent

Why BitTorrent, Inc. failed

Credit: Source: BitTorrent.com

BitTorrent, Inc. made decisions that seemed reasonable for the time. Its business models anticipated the trends that would define the next decade — direct creator distribution, user-generated content, and subscription platforms. But by the late 2000s, streaming services like Pandora and YouTube had already reshaped how people consumed media, and torrenting itself cost nothing. It’s hard to monetize open-source software, especially when more convenient centralized options already exist.

In my view, BitTorrent’s biggest challenge wasn’t vision but direction. The company pivoted constantly — from creator marketplace to digital storefront, enterprise platform, and finally blockchain integration — without focusing on one strategy long enough to make it sustainable. Spotify, which relied on a similar technical foundation, succeeded by staying singularly focused. BitTorrent’s ideas were often right, but the execution drifted.

Investor influence also played a major role in that instability. When Jeremy Johnson and Robert Delamar became co-CEOs, they reportedly spent heavily in a short period. Soon after, it was clear they had burned through far more money than they brought in. Bram Cohen later said, “The truth is we’ve actually been doing fine for quite a while now. We haven’t had technology problems or business problems — we’ve had investor problems.”

He also criticized the transition that gave them control: “Basically, Accel took their share in BitTorrent and pretty much just gave it away to these total strangers who they didn’t know. And not only gave away their stock but gave away control of the company.” Cohen believed the new leadership lacked a coherent plan. “Plan? Why do you think they had a plan? They were kids in a candy store. Their plan was like, ‘Oh my god, we got money, we got power, we’re such geniuses, we can do everything here.’”

I’ve seen that dynamic myself — people with inherited wealth or investor backing stepping into leadership without real experience. They spend recklessly, insulated by their own safety net, unaware of how much damage that can do to the people and companies relying on them.

Cohen’s neurodivergence likely compounded the disconnect. His direct, literal communication style worked in engineering circles, where precision mattered more than performance. But investors and executives thrived on persuasion, posturing, and control — the very traits he avoided. I relate to that. I communicate the same way: clear, logical, without subtext. Some interpret it as arrogance or hostility when it isn’t. For people like Cohen, indirect communication feels inefficient. The goal is accuracy, not diplomacy.

That clash — between a mind built for solving problems and a culture built on appearances — may have been BitTorrent’s most persistent and least recognized challenge.

Torrenting’s persistence and legacy

Credit: Source: Flicker - G0SUB (Cropped)

Despite its decline in mainstream use, torrenting never disappeared. It remains a practical, decentralized way to share data and access media unavailable anywhere else. Torrents still distribute leaked or pre-release content, high-quality rips of films and albums, and comprehensive collections that streaming platforms rarely offer. Unlike streaming, torrents allow full offline access and preserve files independently of any company or platform.

That distinction matters. Major digital stores and streaming services can revoke access to purchased content — Amazon has removed books from users’ libraries, and films regularly vanish from streaming catalogs. Torrents exist outside that control. They often serve as the last access point for rare or lost media, politically censored material, and niche works that never made it to modern platforms. Fans use them to share demos, live performances, and unreleased recordings. Collectors archive broadcast-only television, early software, game betas, and modified versions that would otherwise be lost to copyright enforcement.

In many ways, torrenting has become an informal digital preservation system. It sustains access to culture outside corporate ecosystems and resists the impermanence and perpetual expense of subscription-based media. BitTorrent’s legacy isn’t defined by its company, but by the endurance of the protocol itself — and by the communities that keep using it to preserve information, art, and history.