BitTorrent HLD: Downloading From Strangers, With No Server

A blockbuster game ships a 90 GB patch at 5pm, and within the hour ten million people hit download at once. On any normal service that's the nightmare spike — the one that melts the origin and drags everyone's latency to a crawl. On a torrent it's the opposite: the download gets faster the more people pile in, and there's no server anywhere paying the bandwidth bill. You've felt this pulling a Linux ISO or a big game off a torrent — the meter climbs as dozens of strangers' machines feed you pieces at once. That inversion is the whole appeal, and it drops two problems on the table that are the …