Another main reason why I took off my hat back then was because I was a broke college kid with garbage internet speed and my only computer was a laptop. Torrenting shows sometimes means I need to have my laptop on for days. Now I have an entire homelab setup with a dedicated VM on one of my servers for torrenting and I can afford fast internet. I was pleasantly surprised how efficiently I can torrent when I got back sailing recently.

For me it’s just more power efficient to run a VM on my TrueNAS for this purpose if I need to download very large files over night. It also speeds up file transfer / storage.