Yes, I torrent on the same machine where all my personal stuff is. The biggest reason for this is that I don’t have a dedicated machine to torrent 24/7, though I’d definitely like to set that up at some point. I like being able to seed niche torrents to those who need them, and a machine seeding 24/7 would definitely help with that. Also having easy simple access to the downloaded files is always a plus, but there’s a myriad of ways to do this over a local network (pretty sure some torrenting clients even have an option to torrent over LAN).

My torrent client is bound to my VPN’s network interface, and my VPN has a killswitch as well, so I’m not paranoid that things will suddenly leak. Been running this setup for months now without issues.

not exactly. you use an old machine like that and run it headless... throw a bunch of containers on it..

get yourself a gluetun and maybe deluge containers.. youll have a solid vpn connection, and a torrenting client that wont bleed to public. you can run all kinds of compartmentalized services fairly easily.

I used to torrent on my work machine too lmao

Yes let me post PII about my device setup I use for illegal activities to a PUBLIC FORUM

This is like asking “do you own a second computer?”

Security starts first with you. Most of the attacks are done though social engineering. Email phishing, dodgy webpage logins. Normal password security behaviour should fine for you to use the pc. More importantly, what is the distro you're using? Maybe consider using Flatpaks for the apps, they tend to offer more restrictions on access to the system. (Installing the torrent app as a Flatpak and only give it permissions to a specific folder) One of things I tend to do is install chromium just to login on my Google apps, Gmail, YT. But I'm more of a non data sharing freak.

I don't pirate very often anymore, but when I do, I use whatever computer I happen to be on. I just turn on a VPN and bind the torrenting client to the VPN only. This is how I've torrented for years, since the late 2000s. I've gotten a couple strikes from my ISP several years ago, but that was before I had a commercial VPN. Otherwise, I've no issues.

What are the potential security upsides of doing it on a VM/container or a dedicated machine? I can imagine some performance upsides, but that's about it.

I have a dedicated machine that torrents and seeds 24/7 but for some random thing I use my main pc

Technically yes. I have all my piracy stuff running in a VM on my desktop.

I've got some vservers and some block storage at hosters in a different country and I terminate a VPN tunnel there from yet another country. Storage is LUKS encrypted and VMs are configured to halt hard automatically in case of certain triggers that hint towards hypervisor side fuckery.

It's not bullet proof, but it's fire and forget, basically seed boxes where I've split knowledge further.

I used this as an exercise in provider agnostic deployment and I'm mainly hosting archive.org torrents that can use some seeding there.

I don't have a dedicated torrent machine. I sometimes use my phone. Sometimes my gaming PC. Sometimes my TV's PC.

I got a used mini pc to run as a media center, running the arr stack and torrent client that's bound to the VPN interface. For usenet stuff I don't care is it on VPN or not. Its running headless.

If you make sure that the torrent client is set to be bound on the VPN interface, you are fine, if VPN is not up, it should not start, since the interface is not up. For VPN I use wireguard and set the VPN to be brought up by via wg-quick command and use systemd to start it during boot.

You'll be fine using it for personal stuff along with pulling stuff from high seas.

I use a wyse terminal as a torrent downloader and samba server. I stored documents, including my CV on there until recently but started thinking that might be a bad idea. So now I sync those documents between my devices using Syncthing and will soon be installing Jellyfin on that wyse terminal.

Not really a problem with putting other stuff on it, apart from adhering to security standards. If you want to separate your personal stuff from hosted stuff, go ahead, but just because its torrent, doesnt make it much different.
Put it in a VM if you dont have a second machine i guess.

Depends on the devices I have on hand. Both my laptop and have my VPN, so I am able to get my LibreOffice windows downloads and ahem other things that I am not gonna talk about.

Yep, since I mostly pirate obscure games I don't need to worry about the VPN. Lutris works great for fitgirl-repacks

I have a VM running as a seedbox with full time VPN on my synology NAS. I use that synology for lots of other stuff.

I have a dedicated computer for torrents and I don't sign into any accounts with it, I also block torrents on my router and bind my client to my VPN seems to work out okay

We have a torrent client set up on our nas. We use truenas.

Yeah, although, now that you bring it up, I might want to put it in a vm.

I use an optiplex for torrenting, Plex media server, and real debrid. The VPN is always on so I wouldn't be concerned to use it as my daily driver but it's a bit old to handle other tasks in use my daily driver for.

Currently I'm using a crypto VPS with gluetun for torrenting I swap VPN server every 3 days.

For security reasons I can't tell you what's the country I live in but my VPS it's hosted in Russia.

Device? All instances of torrent clients I use run in Kubernetes pods. I then access my Linux ISOs over NFS shares hooked up as PersistentVolume mounts

How about installing RustDesk server con the laptop? Have you heard about Docker and self-hosting? That's a fun rollercoaster surrounded by rabbit holes ;P GL, HF.

if you use a dedicated device for torrents its more because its faster if you try to also open a browser when torrenting big files and its using all your bandwidth it just makes everything slower.if you seed and download a lot that can slow down everything else you do on that device.