BitTorrent is a peer-to-peer file sharing protocol used for distributing large amounts of data.Torrents, typically ending in “.torrent”,

It’s actually pretty cool technology that really just boils down to another way to download files. So really, you just use .torrent files to download other files.

BitTorrent is a distributed file distribution technology. Yes, “distributed distribution”. When you download a file using BitTorrent, the file is actually broken up into chunk that your BitTorrent client program then downloads and reassembles into the final file as the pieces arrive. To over-simplify, what makes it interesting are two things:

• The different chunks you download can all be coming from different machines. A BitTorrent client will connect to many other BitTorrent clients and download several chunks at once, in random order. In the long run this makes the protocol fairly efficient, and very nicely scalable - the more BitTorrent clients that are serving up a given file, the faster other clients can download it.
• As you start collecting chunks of the file, your BitTorrent client will start making those chunks available for downloading to other BitTorrent clients, and will become a part of the peer-to-peer file distribution network.

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