Programmer Bram Cohen, a University at Buffalo alumnus, designed the protocol in April 2001, and released the first available version on 2 July 2001.
The first release of the BitTorrent client had no search engine and

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The BitTorrent protocol can be used to reduce the server and network impact of distributing large files. Rather than downloading a file from a single source server, the BitTorrent

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Distributed trackers
On 2 May 2005, Azureus 2.3.0.0 (now known as Vuze) was released, introducing support for "trackerless" torrents through a system called the "distributed database." This system is a Distributed hash tableimplementation which

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The BitTorrent specification is free to use and many clients are open source, so BitTorrent clients have been created for all common

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A growing number of individuals and organizations are using BitTorrent to distribute their own or licensed works (e.g. indiebands distributing digital files of their new songs). Independent adopters report that BitTorrent technology reduces demands on private

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Although the protocol itself is legal, problems stem from using the protocol to traffic copyright infringing works, since BitTorrent is often used to download otherwise paid content,

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One concern is the UDP flood attack. BitTorrent implementations often use μTP for their communication. To achieve high bandwidths, the underlying protocol used is UDP, which allows spoofing of source addresses of internet traffic. It has been possible to carry out

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