Torrenting exposes your public IP. In a country where government doesn't care, does that pose a risk?
I honestly don't believe I will have any legal trouble because I don't do anything like cp or worse, I just pirate media I like, not even porn. But across users of communities, or on public trackers, is IP exposure something to be concerned about?
I'm in the same boat. There have been numerous copyright lawsuits that have been thrown out by the courts in my country; however, I pirate because I'm poor AF so I can't afford a VPN anyway.
If you're "self hosting VPN" then both your ingress and outgoing VPN servers are showing THEIR I.P. address publicly, which is then tied back to you through DNS/Hosting services, so, Lucy, splain that to me
Simple: make friends with someone with high speed internet who's not very savvy, keep up the charade until they allow you to borrow their computer. Then you install a headless vpn server with logging disabled. Boom, high speed local VPN that doesn't point to you. Just buy them a $2.50 beer once a month to keep up pretenses in case you need to do maintenance.
To find out my real IP address, you need to contact a hosting provider that is registered in a country with laws that allow it not to cooperate with authorities.
If you're self-hosting a VPN that you're using for piracy, you'll still have an unique IP associated with you, and your hosting provider knows that you're using that IP. Doesn't that defeat the purpose?
The majority of VPNs are self-hosted. The most common use cases for a VPN are things like connecting to an employer's network when working from home, or connecting to your home server when away from home.
Commercial VPNs that route all your traffic through them aren't the usual VPN use case. They've become common mostly because people don't know how to use proxies, and they make it easy to ensure everything is routed via the VPN. A lot of use cases that people use VPNs for could really be solved with proxies.