Overall the marketing is dishonest/over promises and there's some previous lack of transparency with data breaches along with being closed source. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/NordVPN#Criticism

There's just better options: https://thatoneprivacysite.xyz/

How have you not yet realised to be very doubtful and suspicious of anything that's heavily advertised on YouTube etc? Which Nord is like top 5 of along with Raid Shadow Legends, Raycon earbuds, BetterHelp and Manscaped. All, including Nord, having been widely known for years to be scams and/or just shitty products and companies. Do you really think they'd do those sponsorship deals if they were actually good and naturally got customers via word of mouth? All of this is so damn obvious.

Nord is owned by a shady company

aside from the fact it just doesn't work on windows 10 anymore for me?

idk it also seems to not work for torrenting, one of my ISPs blocks torrent traffic when using it now

It's not too bad. The client is the usual bulky Electron trash though.

it has google firebase trackers https://reports.exodus-privacy.eu.org/en/reports/652224/

use mullvad instead

Nothing really, I've been using them for years and have had no issues.

If you're just pirating movies it's fine, as long as you're not selling state secrets or anything like that you're fine with nord.

If you don't use the VPN for normal things then you leave yourself open to indentification by correlation. It's the same rule for naive Tor users. The more normal and distributed it appears in traffic, the harder it is to correlate other pieces of data they they already have access to.

You shouldn't need to pay for a VPN to prevent your ISP from seeing whether your torrent is public-domain or not if you're using TLS.

We didn't start the fire....

That's not when they gave it away. It was well and truly gone 24 years ago lest terrorists win

Spotify got its start by distributing its music files peer-to-peer as well.

Interesting! Thanks

Bram Cohen. He also created a crypto protocol called Chia, which is interesting. The idea was to create a green (ish) crypto that would leverage existing resources, in this case old storage drives. So it uses "proof of space" rather than "proof of work". The "plotter" (as opposed to computationally intensive GPU/CPU "mining") fills up your storage space with "plots", randomly generated data files ~100gb each. To earn crypto, it's basically a lottery against your plots. The network gives you a random hash, and if it matches one of your plot files, you get rewarded with a token. Very low power, keeps old storage out of landfill a while longer, and once those plots are initially made, they're good to go forever - they can "win" more than once, so the more energy-intensive process of plotting (though it's still nowhere near the consumption of proof-of-work, which is a disaster) has a natural upper limit of your total storage space.

The difficult bit is creating the plots, it takes hours to days to create one, depending on your write speed. I put my fastest storage on that, a specialised PCIe nvme SSD. I think I was able to bang out a plot every couple hours eventually, then I would offload it to a somewhat monstrous storage server with the maximum number of drives the motherboard would support. Others in the community created massive RAM drives. Very expensive, but super duper fast.

I plotted for a while, but cashed out when it stopped making sense economically. Eventually, the price per terabyte of storage + electricity eclipsed any significant gains. Did a lot of scavenging, haunting thrift shops, and trading up for higher storage capacity on eBay. Actually made a few grand of pure profit before the price settled down, and difficulty increased. That was the most fun I've ever had with crypto. Besides all the storage, cables and hubs, I built my "farm" solely from stuff I already had laying around. I even made a profit selling all the drives back, as this project singlehandedly pulled almost all the slack out of the used storage market. It kept a lot of equipment out of the landfill for much longer than usual, which is pretty neat.

thx for clearing that up! in Europe at least, consumer protection laws cover downloads ("you're a moron who doesn't know what you're actually downloading and whether it is legal"), but seeding == distributing, which is a punishable offence

It doesn't provide legal safety here in the states, you'll wanna use some kind of anonymizing service.

If, however, you plan to do lots of streaming of your torrents, it is absolutely the best way to go. I am familiar with RealDebrid, which is a similar service. Its good stuff, probably pay with cash-by-mail or cryptocurrency though.

AllDebrid retains files for 30 days and must be seeding a ton (how would they get high download speed otherwise?), what am i missing here?

the caching of files also helps, since they're only leeched once, then downloaded from their servers by potentially more than one user

Best I can do is a copy of Roller Coaster Tycoon.

I am under-educated on this matter. Does that mean that establishments that run torrenting trackers have to seed/peer content? If so, that is very cool for people in regions where torrenting is not punished yet.