I have been doing torrents + VPN for years now and thinking about switching.
Is usenet and debrid safe to use without a VPN in the UK? What about other piracy streaming sites?
From what I understand it's cheaper to use a VPN than have debrid + usenet + private indexers but I am not sure.
I have heard some questionable justifications as to why it's safer such as it being encrypted (torrents can also be encrypted). Are the index sites also safe? I have heard it both ways about this. Including people saying index sites are not encrypted which they normally are.
it's not that they sniff traffic for torrents because that's as you said encrypted it's that bad actors can join public trackers and gather all the ips and send them off to your isp if your on private trackers that you trust you don't need a VPN
This is also why peer block was invented. To stop people connecting to honey pots.