Twenty-five years ago, a programmer named Bram Cohen posted a short message to a P2P mailing list. “My new app, BitTorrent, is now in working order, check it out here.” Someone asked what it was. Cohen never replied.
The world found out anyway.
BitTorrent became the most popular file-sharing app on the planet. At its peak, it accounted for a third of all internet traffic. Hollywood tried to stop it — just like they stopped Napster, Kazaa, LimeWire, and every other P2P service. They failed.
The key difference: BitTorrent was designed without search and without a central index. Cohen outsourced content discovery to third-party sites and tracker servers. He had no way of knowing what files people were trading. That structure shielded BitTorrent from the legal liability that killed every competitor.
BitTorrent remains the only major file-sharing software publisher that never got sued by Hollywood.
The early adopters? Jam band fans. Etree, an online community for Phish and Grateful Dead bootlegs, was one of the first to embrace it. Then came anime. Then came everything else.
Cohen later co-founded a company around the protocol, which struggled for years to turn the technology into real revenue. Torrent sites like Suprnova and The Pirate Bay became household names. The protocol itself lives on — still pulling tens of millions of monthly users.
As Cohen put it: “Going into it, my plan was not to start a business. My plan was to start a revolution.”
He succeeded.
