I want to get off mr. bones' wild ride

i have a file or folder on my pc that i want to share with other people. let's call it gayshit.mp3

unfortunately gayshit.mp3 is 750mb and im not paying for discord nitro so i need another way to send it

i put it into qbittorrent and it makes a torrent file. this is essentially a very small file that points to gayshit.mp3 so other computers can find it. kinda like a treasure map

i send this tiny file to my friend, who loads it into qbittorrent. their computer takes a moment to find mine over the vast expanse of cyberspace and then (as long as my pc is running and the file is still where it should be), it gets copied from my hard drive to theirs

this is the cool part: if somebody else loads that tiny file, they can download it from both of us. if i'm offline but my friend is on, the third person can still get it. this also means that if two people have separate halves of the file, they can download the other half from each other. as long as some combination of people have the pieces between them, they can all have the whole thing.

crucially this does not require a server!!! you can just upload the file to a few people and as long as they keep it, it's still accessible. as long as somebody, somewhere is still connected, it's available forever. the only way it goes away is if everybody disconnects from it.

My dad paypals me 20 bucks every exam season "for red bull and snickers" because he swears by a trick he used to do in college where he would chug a red bull and eat a snickers in the exam hall before every single one of his exams and he did well on all of them. Legitimately swears to this day that it works and makes me do it. The first time I tried it I also knocked the exam out of the park. It would take 2 more years for either of us to figure out we had low blood pressure and what all that caffeine and sugar was making us experience was known as "normal blood pressure allowing us to concentrate better." My dad still swears that it was the red bull and snickers and not the medical equivalent of using the wrong equation and getting the right answer.