BTGuard BitTorrent Proxy protects my privacy by routing P2P traffic through a server before sending it to me. Legal authorities can not recognize me while I am torrenting. When encryption is enabled, the ISP can not throttle my bandwidth. This anonymous proxy is very good for anonymity in BitTorrent networks. It can not be used for browsing. It is easy to setup. It is fast. It costs 30 percent less than a cheap VPN.
How BTGuard BitTorrent Proxy Works
The product consists of settings. The settings are proxy type, proxy server address, port, and username and password for authentication. When you use the pre-configured uTorrent client from the BTGuard website, you only need username and password.
I join BTGuard. I do not need to enter my name or address, only a username and a password. For a three-month subscription, they give you five percent discount, for twelve months, you get 25 percent. I pay monthly with PayPal. I can cancel anytime.
The account is immediately activated. I login to the customer area. There are two installation variants: Easy Install and Advanced Install. Easy Install is a pre-configured uTorrent client. It is not the most recent version. It installs with settings for anonymity in place.
I choose Advanced Install. There are instructions for uTorrent, Vuze, and BitComet. There is also a description for configuring any other torrent client. I setup BTGuard for uTorrent. For Mac OS and Linux, they recommend Vuze.
BTGuard supports programs that use a SOCKS5 proxy (a proxy with a certain type of authentication). One of the few BitTorrent clients that do not support SOCKS5 is Transmission, the default client of Ubuntu Linux.
BTGuard BitTorrent Proxy can not be used with a web browser because no popular browser supports SOCKS5. Any software supporting SOCKS5 should work. The primary use of BTGuard is BitTorrent anonymization.
Anonymity Settings for uTorrent
In uTorrent, I make these settings for BitTorrent anonymity: Disable all local DNS lookups. Disable features that leak identifying information. Disable connections unsupported by the proxy.
uTorrent anonymity settings for anonymous torrenting. Login credentials of BTGuard
I create a torrent at Check My Torrent IP. Under the label Trackers, uTorrent displays the IP address of the proxy server, my real IP address does not appear. For me, that proves that uTorrent hides my IP address.
How about BTGuard transmission speed? I download an ISO image. The download rate is on average 590 kilobyte per second (kB/s), a very good value for a DSL 6000 connection with 767,75 kB/s downstream capacity.
There is also a software for aditionally encrypting the data traffic. This is appropriate when your ISP throttles your bandwidth to punish you for file sharing. The encryption makes BitTorrent data signatures unnoticable for the ISP.
I set aside the installation of the encryption software. I can not say if it works or how it influences BTGuard speed. I am still anonymous without it.
Conclusion
My IP address is reliably masked. The transmission speed is on par with the transmission speed before using BTGuard. The service is useful for file sharing. It is worth the money. I am using this BitTorrent proxy for years now. I did not experience any outages. I did not get into legal troubles because of file sharing. Use anonymous torrent