Great solution. Keep in mind the average user isn’t quite as sophisticated.
Them working only with the torrent client is kind of the point?
My post was specifically about torrenting. That said your presumptions aren’t entirely accurate. A VPN on your entire network causes more problems than it solves. If your concern is privacy, you can accomplish that largely with encrypted DNS. There’s little if any additional privacy gained with a VPN.
Additionally, your Internet provider is usually a large US based corporation, which has much greater accountability to you than an opaque offshore VPN provider that is by design outside the jurisdiction of US courts.
Encrypted DNS provides as much privacy protection as a VPN, and in some ways more. Sure without a VPN they can see you’re connected to a server, but not more than that.
I’m sure with you on the avoiding Google though, and especially Android.
Most people don’t realize that encrypted DNS provides almost the same privacy as a VPN without the overhead and other problems a VPN can create. Pi-hole was a great solution before cloud based providers; now they seem a bit old fashioned don’t they?
I think the point that you missed, and that’s really indisputably true, is that a VPN is overkill if it’s used only for torrenting. By default, a VPN is applied to ALL traffic even though it’s only needed for torrent traffic. SOCKS5 by default only applies to torrent traffic.
Not everyone wants or needs all of their traffic to go over a VPN. That was the point of my post I’m sorry if it wasn’t clear.
So basically you ignored the binding and port-forwarding, which is all we need to know about how seriously to take your comment. But alright, I’ll reply:
Unless you have a dedicated IP, which very few have, many sites will give you a CAPTCHA
That is true for some VPNs, eg. ExpressVPN where it’s CAPTCHA hell in every server. But for my recent daily drivers which are Mullvad and Cryptostorm, it’s smooth sailing. You don’t really need dedicated IP addresses for it, actually you should avoid VPNs who provide it.
I’d be interested in knowing what bank you use that doesn’t think a VPN address is an indicator of a hacking attempt
All of them. Most of them have 2FA which makes your IP address virtually irrelevant, doesn’t even prompt a CAPTCHA.
So yeah, SOCKS5 bad VPN good.
I have no complaints, and there’s certainly nothing nonsensical?
I don’t really consider them nonsensical but they are avoidable.
Running everything through a VPN can cause issues even if it just slowing everything down.
Most users don’t want to learn but nearly any reputable VPN will have an openVPN and/or WireGuard configuration.
You must also bind to the torrent client. Kill switch isn’t enough.
no need, any decent VPN should provide wireguard or openvpn config files, at which point it’s trivial to setup split tunneling yourself, and instead of a kill switch just use a good torrent client and bind the torrent client to the interface
eh. i click a button. thats less effort than setting this all up so I’m ok with it. good info for someone who is doing a new install of all their torrenting stuff, but what i have set up works
https://mullvad.net/en/help/socks5-proxy/
Its only accessible when you are using the client. Its a good killswitch. I use the socks5 even though mullvad has a vpn kill switch option.
Amazing. Everything you said is wrong. The blind leading the blind.
I don’t even use my phone on the internet. My VPN rocks!
Why settle for “almost”? There are these " Free" Dns services that sell aggregate data to IBM and others who are in the business of threat alert systems.
I’m referring to MACE, which is a dns level ad and malware blocking solution available with my VPN provider, so i dont need pihole, but i would prefer to use that over supposedly free dns providers.
It’s a trust thing, and if it’s free they are being paid for the data somehow.
And no, as great as cloudflare is, it’s still iffy for a lot of folks in terms of privacy issues.
no, it is necessary if you wish to meaningfully re contribute to the community, which is something that is needed for torrenting to thrive since a socks proxy greatly reduces the capability to do so.
thats not overkill thats necessary
Hey sorry you misunderstood, but I didn’t ignore anything. As I said, it’s absolutely true you CAN configure a VPN to solve some of those problems, while SOCK5 doesn’t even have the same problems.
It’s certainly a choice, though SOCK5 remains faster, there’s no good or bad! 
The point I was trying to make is that, for many people, there’s one thing (SOCKS5) that does EXACTLY what they want… it protects ONLY torrent traffic, leaves everything else alone, requires no software, no apps, no configuration, only and IP address, username , and password.
Then there’s this other thing, (VPN) that can be made to do the same thing, but requires installing and configuring an app, etc.
All I’m saying is that for someone who only wants to protect torrent traffic that SOCKS5 is objectively easier and simpler than a VPN.