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I don't understand the importance of encryption in BitTorrent. Correct me if I'm wrong but sharing parties have no way of verifying each other's identity so the whole exchange is vurnable to MitM attacks. Also, file integrity is solved by the torrent metadata you add to the client.

I guess it makes it more costly to monitor content as the evil party has to involve itself instead of just monitoring.

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My recollection is BitTorrent encryption has mostly nothing to do with real security, and almost everything to do with the cat-and-mouse against ISP middleboxes. Plaintext BitTorrent traffic was highly identifiable and blockable, but even simple obfuscation was enough to avoid them, so simple encryption was adopted.

Yes. It was mostly to stop ISP throttling.

Bram's case against was based on the idea ISPs couldn't cache data if you did.

Now we know encryption good, combined with things like peerblock it has a ok use. And the caching never happened.

Also at the time Skype was the spies messager because encryption was turned on by default, back then people looked suspicious if they encrypted, the extra encrypted data flowing around would have been good.

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