First of all, please do not discuss about Torrent for piracy reasons!

There is on the Humble Indie Bundle a direct download link and also a Torrent link. What is the advantage of torrenting versus directly downloading? Is this mostly suited towards people with a low bandwidth so they can save the file bit-by-bit? I can see the advantage on large files, if your connection is not too good. If I have a good connection, the direct download is better for me, I assume? Or is there a catch?

Yes, I understand that Wolfire might save money by the torrents. Is there any other good reason to use torrents?

By now, I usually use only Steam keys anyway and barely download the games directly, so this is mostly a hypothetical question.

Again: Please no piracy talk.

Partial downloads (pause/resume), built-in consistency checking (if part of a torrent doesn't match its checksum, that part is downloaded again), and saving Wolfire bandwidth by downloading from other users as well. Possibly faster downloads too (depending on the connected peers' upload bandwidth).

Direct download uses a fix bandwith - you can only download as fast as the host lets you. So, if the host can only upload 10 MB per sec, you can only download 10 MB per sec.

Torrent is using a connection type called peer-to-peer. Originally, the file only available at one place (the host, or the seeder). The peers (the ones who wants to download the file) connect to the seed and start the download, but as soon as they have a little bit of it (slice), they become seeders, too. This means torrents are faster than direct downloads, even if all of the seeders can upload 1 MB per sec, at 100 seeders that 100 MB per sec.

And, of course, after enough people have the file, the server isn't required anymore (or can be run with less bandwith). Oh, and you can stop your download to continue it any time you want from where you stopped. Direct downloads don't usually support that.

So: torrents are faster, cheaper and more reliable than direct download.

The links to torrent files you find on the HIB page are good to go, "legal" files, use them if you want. Keep in mind, not every torrent is bad or illegal.

If you have a bad connection then bittorrent's reliability and better resuming functionality make it better than direct download. On the other hand, if you have a good connection then bittorrent can give you better speed because it's limited by your download speed and not that of the content server (your actual speed depends on the number of peers downloading or seeding the same file).

Either way, the consistency-checking and nice way that popular bittorrent clients organise your downloads for you make bittorrent much better-suited than direct downloads. A big advantage is that it's much cheaper for HIB when people use torrents instead of downloading directly. I recommend always using the torrents if the option is available to you.

It saves the HIB guys on bandwidth. That's what your Humble Tip covers, so if you're willing, use the torrent link and make the tip go further.

Everything else is incidental.