Bittorrent is a pretty interesting way to share files. You have “torrents”, “seeders”, “leechers”, and “trackers”. Let’s hypothetically say that you have a copy of a 641 MB documentary on super-heroes that you want to share with your peeps out there in the world.
You make a file called a “torrent” that references the location of the file on your computer as well as a “tracker”. You upload the torrent to the tracker and then launch the Bittorrent application. The torrent is a tiny file. Maybe 25K.
I launch my client at home and it starts “seeding” the file to anyone that requests it. When they start downloading, a 641 MB file would be created but nothing is really there yet. The file is broken up into lots and lots of little tiny pieces. The tracker keeps up with who is downloading and who is uploading. The beauty of Bittorrent is that while you are downloading these tiny pieces of the file you are also uploading the pieces you already have to people who don’t have those yet. As you get the pieces , they start filling up the file on your computer until it is 100% done.
Once your file is complete and you are still uploading, you go from a leecher to a seeder. If you are nice, you will keep seeding a file for a while to help your peers download.
In the case of the hypothetical 641 MB documentary, let’s say 28 people have hypothetically “snatched it” (completed the download) but my machine might have sent out 1.7 GB of data for this 17 GB of data. Or whatever. I don’t know math.
