How Qortal Revolutionized Torrents

If you speak to any millennial having grown up with dial-up internet, with early, scrappy versions of Windows 95 or 98, and with floppy disks of 360kb, they’ll also tell you about their history with downloading music off Limewire or Kazaa. These were old torrenting softwares, mostly known for downloading pirated music. In 2007, it was estimated that Limewire had been installed on over one-third of all computers globally.¹ They were eventually forced by injunction to stop distributing the software, and to pay $105 million dollars in damages. As we’ll see in this article, this is the fate met by most torrenting websites, but with the arrival of Qortal’s Q-Share app, it doesn’t need to be. Let’s get into it.

Millennials will immediately recognize this screenshot of Limewire²

Another recent significant event in the torrenting space occurred in 2016 when the website domain “Kickass Torrents” was seized by the US government, and its founder arrested in Poland.³ This torrenting website had by 2014 become the most visited BitTorrent directory in the world, overtaking The Pirate Bay, according to the site's Alexa ranking. When it went down, the domain shortly reappeared not longer after, under a different top-level domain. Today, there are still countless torrenting websites in existence, with millions of users still downloading and sharing files on a daily basis.⁴

Kickass was taken down in late 2015 as seen in this screenshot of its domain⁵

But torrents face many other problems, on top of their precarious existence in the eyes of governments around the world. One of these is that many files downloaded on torrent websites are disguised malware or contain malicious files that can harm your device or steal your data. They can also serve as trojan horses so that hackers can infiltrate your computer.⁶ Privacy lovers should also be concerned about downloading torrents, because doing so exposes their IP address to the torrent swarm. Malicious actors can then target their connection or attempt to identify them, making them vulnerable to various threats.⁷

Some Internet Service Providers (ISPs) have gone so far as to install malware on their subscribers' computers, in an attempt to interfere with and block torrent traffic, which was believed to have been placing financial pressure on the company.⁸ As crazy as this sounds, it is true, and is only possible because of the centralization of the normal internet.

This Korean News Agency reports on the telecommunications giant KT is under investigation for allegedly hacking the systems of customers who used torrent services.⁹

Enter Q-Share! It’s a Q-App found on the Qortal Ecosystem which allows users to share and download files uploaded by other Qortal users. For the first time ever, users can share and download files without fear of takedowns, censorship, or surveillance! These files are separated into categories for easy filtering, just like with a normal torrent website. The biggest difference lies in the fact that it isn't a website, but an uncensorable, unhackable, and untraceable application propagated by every node on the Qortal network. When a user uploads a file to the Qortal Data Network (QDN), it’s stored across multiple nodes instead of a single location. As others download it, they also help propagate and store the file, ensuring permanent availability.

Screenshot of Q-Share on Qortal Hub¹⁰

In other words, Q-Share solves every problem found with traditional torrent websites by simply offering a better way to exchange data between users on the network. Traditional torrenting relies on centralized websites, such as The Pirate Bay, to list torrent files. And these torrents depend on central trackers to coordinate downloads. While modern BitTorrent clients have implemented decentralized methods like Distributed Hash Tables (DHT) to discover peers without trackers, trackers are still often included with torrents to improve the speed of peer discovery.¹¹ Hence, when these centralized trackers get taken down by governments, or blocked by ISPs, all the data is by definition gone too!

Governments cannot take down Qortal, as you cannot take down a network which has no single point of failure. As for ISPs, they are absolutely powerless in the face of Qortal, as nothing that happens on the Qortal ecosystem can be tracked or traced back to an IP address. Users can be as anonymous as they wish, by creating as many accounts as necessary. So while censorship and deplatforming is a big problem for torrent websites on the normal internet, the same can be said for content creators on big tech social media websites, or small sellers on e-commerce giants, as we’ve seen in previous blog posts.

To conclude, while torrenting has been on a downward trend over the years, it is still a major industry on the normal internet. Users looking for a better, innovative way to trade data easily should turn their eyes to Web3, and specifically to Qortal, which has facilitated this kind of data transfer, while also removing any chance of censorship, data harvesting, hacking, viruses, and so many other issues that plague the normal internet.

The future of file sharing is already here, but only for those who take action! If you’re still relying on outdated torrent sites that could disappear tomorrow, it’s time to make the switch. Install Qortal today, explore Q-Share, and experience truly unstoppable file sharing.

1. Zahn, J. (2010, November 4). The life and death of LimeWire. Marquette Wire. https://marquettewire.org/3777966/tribune/marquee/the-life-and-death-of-limewire-mr1-se2-je3/

2. Wikimedia Commons. (2008). LimeWire 2008 interface [Image]. Wikimedia Commons. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/8c/Limewire2008.PNG

3. Statt, N. (2016, July 20). KickassTorrents domains seized after alleged owner is arrested in Poland. The Verge. https://www.theverge.com/2016/7/20/12243592/kickass-torrents-artem-vaulin-founder-arrested-domains-seized

4. PC Matic. (n.d.). Torrent usage trends & statistics: A year-by-year analysis. PC Matic. https://www.pcmatic.com/blog/torrent-usage-trends-statistics-a-year-by-year-analysis/

5. ThinkComputers. (2015, February). KickassTorrents domain taken down by domain name seizure [Image]. ThinkComputers.org. https://thinkcomputers.org/kickasstorrents-domain-taken-down-by-domain-name-seizure/

6. SOCRadar. (2023, September 29). The torrent landscape: Understanding security, risks, and the future. SOCRadar. https://socradar.io/the-torrent-landscape-understanding-security-risks-and-the-future/

7. Frank Line Tech. (2024, July 17). Why torrenting is risky: The safety concerns you need to know. Frank Line Tech. https://franklinetech.com/why-torrenting-is-risky/

8. Burgess, R. (2024, June 15). Korean ISP accused of installing malware on 600,000 customer PCs. TechSpot. https://www.techspot.com/news/103548-korean-isp-accused-installing-malware-600000-customers-pcs.html

9. The Cyber Express. (2024, February). South Korean KT ISP installing malware [Image]. The Cyber Express. https://thecyberexpress.com/south-korean-isp-installing-malware/

10. Qortal Project. (n.d.). Q-Share Homepage [Screenshot]. Qortal Hub.

11. Ross, K. W. (n.d.). Peer-to-peer systems [PDF]. NYU Tandon School of Engineering. https://cse.engineering.nyu.edu/~ross/papers/PEXIEEEp2p.pdf