Seems like a lot of people replying need to work on their reading comprehension…

Use private trackers only. Public trackers are way easier to identify you on.
Disable DHT, PeX and Local Peer Discovery in your BitTorrent client. This will prevent you connecting to random public peers.
If you’re just interested in movies/TV I recommend streaming sites with an adblocker. Just so much easier and safe enough. Find sites on fmhy.net

fmhy has a beginners guide, there’s lots of options that don’t require torrenting

for torrenting specifically, I’ve been using cloudflare’s vpn (1.1.1.1) without issues, though it requires a bit of setup with wireguard

Make friends in the criminal underworld. Online, anonymous only. Then ask for a ssh access and install a vpn from there.

You could use a free VPN like Proton if you’re worried about getting caught. You can also use DNS over https to hide what sites you’re visiting from being visible, and you might not even need a VPN depending on your area, as others have mentioned. I’ve pirated so much stuff for years and never gotten any angry letters.

gnutella :3

You can pirate over IRC XCDD. Without VPN the IRC server, other people on the server as well as the servers you are downloading from know your IP but it’s significantly less exposure than torrents since you aren’t seeding anything.

What would you advise i do?

If you can afford to and if what you are looking for is even available (for non-DRM’d download) through legal channels, I advise purchasing the content legally. (Yes, I know what community I’m commenting in… :D ) Doing so supports the artists that make the content.

Otherwise, I would check and see if what you are looking for is on Youtube or in Anna’s Archive. You can download things from Youtube using either yt-dlp (give it a Youtube link) or spotdl (give it a Spotify link and it will download the song, album or playlist from Youtube and tag the songs using Spotify or Musicbrainz metadata). The current addresses to Anna’s Archive can be found on their Wikipedia page.

I also like Usenet, currently, for a lot of the more esoteric, hard to find elsewhere things (like TV shows that don’t have DVD releases and aren’t on Youtube). Just a heads up if you go this route, the Usenet provider “Eternal September”, while free, does not provide access to the groups where binaries (things like video, music, epubs, and pdfs) are posted. They only provide access to the discussion side of Usenet, which has been largely dead for the last 10-15 years. Generally, Usenet access is fairly cheap, as are the nzb trackers needed to download binaries from Usenet.

Torrents don’t require a VPN, however, torrenting does broadcast your IP address for all the world to see if they decide to look. A VPN is used to obfuscate your IP address to minimize the odds of trouble with your ISP, the rightholders (who might sue) or depending on where your are, law enforcement. Just don’t ever use the “free” VPNs that are out there. They tend to be honeypots or malware vectors.

People not seeding things has made bittorrent pretty much useless for anything not currently popular. The only thing I use bittorrent for nowadays is speeding up the download of larger downloads, like Linux install disks. Works well for that. But if there’s not at least 15 seeders for the file your looking for, you may never actually be able to finish downloading the thing.

what did you do when starting out?

I’m getting to be an old fart. I was using Napster (early predecessor to bittorrent, now long dead), IRC and random ftp and gopher sites on a dialup modem in the late 90’s and into the mid 2000’s. Dial-up BBS’s were fading out into obscurity, and I hadn’t really heard of Usenet (even though that was during it’s hayday) and Bittorrent hadn’t been invented yet.

where I live last I checked even if an IP holder sends you a cease and desist or other letter you can just ingore it and they can pound sand. If its worse for your country you kinda need the vpn.

What I did, what I do and why I do it

At the beginning of the 2000’s, piracy either wasn’t as prevalent as it is today or it wasn’t as persecuted, or a combination thereof. Which is to say, I started with DC++, Kazaa and direct downloads. No security or privacy measures. This is also when I proudly downloaded the first Pokémon movie Pokémon: The First Movie (1998), sat down with my parents to watch it and then immediately having to explain to them why Pokémon are having sex. Suffice it to say, it was some Pokémon themed hentai.

As my understanding of computers, networking and capitalism evolved - this being around the early 2010’s - and especially as I had learned about the improved, albeit not perfect, anonymity of torrenting in a society with otherwise increasingly oppressive demeanor towards online integrity and piracy -, I decided to only pirate using torrent clients thenceforth. I also took a brief pause from piracy for about six years, as I moved to a jurisdiction whose laws and attitude towards privacy were not known to me. I was doing my Master’s degree and thus couldn’t spare the time and effort it would’ve taken to safely engage in piracy.

As we arrive to present day - present time (any fans here?) -, nation states’ attitude towards piracy - or, rather the lobbyists’ relentless pursuit to reap legal fees - but really just the overall cyber climate with all the data brokers indiscriminately collecting, profiling and selling our data to the highest bidder, I simply don’t dare to be on the clearnet/internet without using a VPN, an adblocker and DNS/hosts file based filtering anymore. I would argue that the risks to the integrity of the individual is great enough to warrant these countermeasures regardless of jurisdiction, but I digress. Sure, if your jurisdiction does not criminalize piracy, be my guest, torrent without a VPN.

My current setup

• VPN: Mullvad VPN, €5 per month https://mullvad.net/en/pricing
• Adblocker (in browser): uBlock Origin https://ublockorigin.com/
• DNS: Mullvad (comes “automatically” with the above services)
• Torrent client: qBittorrent https://www.qbittorrent.org/

A few notes on Mullvad:

• I am using Mullvad VPN on a router so that all my traffic is encrypted, but their desktop app is also good - better in regards to customizability -, just make sure to bind your torrent client to the network interface created by the VPN app.
• You cannot make applications reachable from the internet (aka forward ports) with Mullvad, which would still enable you to download, but it would make you a passive seeder, only reachable by peers that do have port forwarding enabled. (Note: a great majority of the bigger seeders/public seeding groups use so called seeding boxes whose ports are forwarded and I seed in average 8TBs per month with steady share ratios of around 8.0, so don’t let this discourage you, unless maximizing your seeding contributions is what is most important to you.)

Paying nothing

As others have already pointed out, double check what laws apply in your specific jurisdiction before pirating unprotected. I haven’t tried it myself, except for running two of their routers to contribute bandwidth, but file sharing in the closed network i2p is supposedly popular. However, I can neither confirm nor deny this and it is a somewhat more technical approach. All your traffic is encrypted many times over and what you do inside i2p is not visible from the clearnet. https://geti2p.net/en/

Mullvad will coat you 5 bucks a year. If you don’t pay for it, you’re the product.

Well first off, torrenting doesn’t “require” a VPN, you may want to look up your area etc… in most of the united states, basically if you torrent without a VPN, there’s a chance that your ISP will detect it and typically they will send you a letter saying “we know you downloaded _____ illegally, if we catch you again, we will cancel your service”.

which depending on what you are going for (like say new releases and big name targets are what they will be watching for the most)… that could take years to even happen.

Now as far as safe, and lower risk… you could always look up pirating on the IRC… it’s not the most user friendly route out there, but that’s kind of the point, it’s ancient technology and for the most part no one bothers to monitor it.

and then of course there’s just tons of bootleg streaming sites. bottom line anything that’s not peer 2 peer, is pretty much impossible for ISPs to identify what you are doing on… and thus are pretty safe.

I2p

Unfortunately any unencrypted file sharing, or really any unencrypted internet usage at all, carries some risk of ISPs or governments snooping on what you are doing. BitTorrent is just particularly notable because of its history and that by the nature of the protocol, you are uploading (seeding) in addition to downloading.

A good VPN is a few bucks a month and provides a lot of other benefits. It’s worth considering.

Find someone in your circle of friends who can give you an invite to a private tracker or use usenet. Also vpns arent necessarily “required”. It will depend on your area and your download setup.

Mullvad as mentioned. But for free… hmm proton has a free tier, assuming it will take a while to download over it. Or use someone else’s internet. Someone you don’t like.