[winthrowe]

My recollection is BitTorrent encryption has mostly nothing to do with real security, and almost everything to do with the cat-and-mouse against ISP middleboxes. Plaintext BitTorrent traffic was highly identifiable and blockable, but even simple obfuscation was enough to avoid them, so simple encryption was adopted.

[aaron695]

Yes. It was mostly to stop ISP throttling.

Bram's case against was based on the idea ISPs couldn't cache data if you did.

Now we know encryption good, combined with things like peerblock it has a ok use. And the caching never happened.

Also at the time Skype was the spies messager because encryption was turned on by default, back then people looked suspicious if they encrypted, the extra encrypted data flowing around would have been good.