What is BitTorrent? and How Does it Work?

Most of us have heard about torrents and probably also have tried them to download movies, or books, or music, TV series, games, etc. But, What is BitTorrent? and How Does it Work?

BitTorrent is an Internet protocol which supports peer-to-peer (p2p) file sharing to distribute large amounts of data around the world. It was developed by Bram Cohen a computer science graduate student at the University of Buffalo.

Bittorrent takes the stress of transferring large data files from one massive server to every user over an extremely robust network connection and splits it up to multiple normal PCs and multiple smaller network connections.

The first time a file is shared, there is a single seed or user who is uploading the file to the first downloader, so a torrent will always be relatively slow when it’s just been created, however once that original upload/download process complete the user or users who downloaded the file also known as peers from the original seeds also turn into seeds and then the more popular file is the more seeds are created and the faster the speed will be for newcomers.

If you are a Torrent user, you may notice the terms “Seeds”, “Peers” and “Leeches”, let’s understand these terms.

What is a seed?
Seed is the user that have the complete file downloaded already and are now sharing the file with peers but not downloading any parts of the file from others.

What is a leecher?
Leechers are those who are downloading and uploading at the same time.

What is a peer?
Files are downloaded in pieces. When a user downloads some parts, he then automatically starts uploading it. A file will be downloaded quicker if more users are involved in the process.