Imagine some kind of worldwide system, without a central server and dedicated administrator, distributed among a large, constantly changing conglomeration of servers that store and forward messages to one another.
So why is golden the rule of usenet, to not talk about it?
Because if people did, anti-piracy companies would start paying attention to it. Therfore making it way more expensive to run Usenet servers and expose users to legal risk.
It's success depends on its relative obscurity.
You have to provide a credit card to use Usenet (unless you use bitcoins). Making it easy to be targeted.
Torrents "done properly" can be completely anonymous for everyone involved and still free.
So I don't agree that the problem was completely solved by Usenet. Despite being a happy Usenet + NZBmatrix user (oops broke the rule :p).
Usenet is hardly without flaws.
- Comparatively costly
- Native indexing is not available. 3rd party indexes are not distributed
- RAR files
- Does not support streaming as is
- Feedback and rating system is worse (many small 3rd parties, fewer users, files do not persist).
- Easily susceptible to poisoning
- Easily susceptible to censorship and takedowns (few usenet backends).
- etc
