Fiat currency like the US dollar is just as intrinsically worthless. It has value only because people accept that it does, they trade with it, and it has legal status as tender “for all debts, public and private”.
People trade bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies for goods all the time, without converting it to USD or anything first. I mean, yeah, usually the thing they’re buying is drugs or something but it’s the same as handing your local dealer a $20 bill.
Torrenting can be faster than normal downloads. If a server with a fast connection that’s not overloaded can easily be faster than a P2P download that doesn’t have very many peers, or the peers all have slow connections. There’s no fixed percentage speed boost that you get, because sometimes you don’t.
That said, for things like Linux ISOs or archives of stuff that people just keep seeding forever but aren’t hosted on fast file servers (if at all), it’s great and typically the bottleneck is your own connection.
I recently went to Sonic, didn’t use the app, and ended up with norovirus for free.
To be honest, I don’t know how much I trust younger people either with all the plastic in our brains.