Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ

relevant as ever

BitTorrent has a new version now BitTorrent v2 you will see this in BitTorrent clients that support it like qBitTorrent in ways like info hash v2 its still getting better v1 and v2 are not inoperable because some of the changes can not work together but you can create hybrid torrents that can work in both. https://www.libtorrent.org/features-ref.html#bittorrent-v2 https://blog.libtorrent.org/2020/09/bittorrent-v2/

The article you linked answers most of your questions.

1. Relative global upstream traffic went down, but not due to other file-sharing protocols but entirely different applications
2. I2P is not mentioned anywhere in the article, nor any other sharing alternative
3. VPN is mentioned as a potential reason for not being able to identify torrent traffic; VPN has become much more prevalent and promoted in the scene
4. The article says, in piracy, streaming websites are much more popular now

It has not been surpassed by another protocol. The relative numbers don't say much about absolute numbers or usage.

And 10 % of global internet upload is certainly no irrelevancy.

I never used torrent as much as the last years

"Is email still relevant in the modern era?"

I2p is not a more efficient file sharing protocol.

You may be thinking about ipfs, which is a file sharing protocol, but I wouldn't say that is more efficient than bittorrent afaik.

This seems like a dumb question, BitTorrent absolutely is still relevant and probably the most popular method of file sharing in the scene. Foss groups use it too for distributing ISO files for Operating systems, and it might even be used as the video hosting provider in future Fediverse YouTube alternatives (I've heard talk of a video hosting platform on Fedi which uses activitypub for everything else but hosts videos via BitTorrent) pretty cool stuff.

So yeah BitTorrent is still relevant, and it makes sense since if it isn't broken why fix it? Not to say that it couldn't be better, the biggest problem with it is the anonymity issue, but until someone makes something better BitTorrent will continue to be popular, and the ideal choice for decentralized file sharing, especially in the piracy scene.

It's more relevant then ever.

With the media companies ndoing what large media companies do, aarrr think that torrents are very important indeed, matey

When I want to pirate, torrenting is my go to. I don't do it very often, so I'm not really up-to-date on more modern methods. For some movies, I know there are those websites like 123movies or whatever. And I've used those. But Idek what additional methods there are anymore.

That said, I've tried torrenting over I2P, but it's just slow. Not necessarily super slow, but obviously slower than doing it over the clearweb with a commercial VPN. Additionally it seems like there's less available content with torrenting over I2P. At least in the little experience I've had with it.

The protocol is still relevant. Is there anything better yet with enough people using it that it's relatively easy to find anything you want through it?

Yep I've been using it almost 2 decades with basically no slowdown, I have netflix which is bad enough and refuse to pay for any other streaming service so anything not on there I torrent, in addition to games a few times a year would be more because most large developers are trash but I not much of a gamer

The extra time it takes to find a magnet launch my client and DL is worth the money saved, anything popular has enough seeders to DL quick and anything obscure enough not to have many seeders you probably wouldn't find on a premium service at all, as is the feeling of getting one over on atrocious companies and the sense of smug superiority over those paying for 5+ services and still can't watch everything they want

It ain't going anywhere