I Know What You Download on BitTorrent

I've been using a Seedbox since December 2014.

Best 15$/month I pay. You can even pay with Bitcoin, tho I just use PayPal.

2 TB of storage, very fast speed with caching (i.e. some torrents finish immediately if someone else has it downloaded). An uncached Blu-ray ~4 GB movie gets finished in 15-30 mins.

They also have auto-delete feature. If they get a legal complaint they just delete the offending torrent and keep my account the same, no "strikes" or anything like that.

I then download the actual content either from FTP or HTTPS. If its a movie, I just download the single .mp4 file from the portal itself (and skip the subtitle/cover files) with HTTPS straight from Chrome, or even stream it directly through VLC! I only use the FTP if there is a large number of files (e.g. series or non-ISO-packaged software).

They have servers in US, Netherlands and Singapore. I always use the Netherlands server. I doubt anyone uses the US ones.

Even better? I can use the 2 TB for whatever I want, not just for the torrents. That's cheaper than most cloud storage plans for just dummy storage without any torrenting features!

Only problem I have with torrents are unpopular movies/series usually have no seeds, but there is nothing that can be done about that. Only older clients like LimeWire/eMule didn't have that problem, but those had endless malware issues because the content wasn't verified.

Pro-tip: Do not download the actual .torrent file. Many websites are setup to redirect you into an endless loop of shady .exe downloads. Always, always just copy the magnet link to your clipboard. This also makes you safe from any network monitoring that checks for .torrent downloads. No one can prove anything if you just copy a magnet link to your clipboard then paste it to a seedbox since they don't/can't monitor clipboards. Just browsing the page which has the link is perfectly file and doesn't prove intent, vs actually downloading a .torrent file.

VPNs in comparison are quite dodgy. They have slower speeds, no torrent-caching, its possible (and happens more than it should) that the software has a bad config and skips the VPN and uses your actual connection.

Also, I can never trust that the VPN company won't share my details if they get a legal request, specially when most of them are in the US.

VPNs are useful for bypassing censored networks in a university campus or corporate network, but for torrenting they're infinitely inferior to seedboxes.

seedr.cc, bitport.io or zbigz.com exist to solve this problem and would have saved him his job.

That "Track Downloads" feature seems highly unethical.

My IP comes up clean, which is unsurprising because I don't use Bittorrent (at least not for piracy, anyway.) Even if you are going to torrent unscrupulously though, you may as well use a VPN or, if you can justify it, a seedbox. Paying to pirate stuff alone is probably a bit illogical, but OTOH having a VPN for general usage is probably wise for any questionable P2P things. (I am not affiliated or anything but I always feel obliged to throw a recommendation for Mullvad in that regard. Even if you don't care about VPNs, they do some pretty interesting stuff, like working on Coreboot for a server platform.)