title: Why can't torrent traffic be encrypted?
body: <p>The goal of this question is that I am just trying to better understand the nature of P2P and networking and security / encryption. I am a front-end web developer and my knowledge of the networking stack is not great if we go lower than HTTP requests.</p>
  
  <p>That being said, I am trying to understand how torrent traffic is "sniffed" by ISPs and the content identified. I feel like this question will expose my ignorance, but is it not possible to have some sort of HTTPS-like P2P protocol that would not be so readable?</p>
  
  <p>I grasp that a given packet has to identify its destination to the network along the way, but couldn't torrent packets be configured to show ONLY their destination, so that nobody could identify its purpose along the way, until it arrived at its destination? Why is it apparently an unrectifiable situation that ISPs can just look at P2P traffic and know everything about it, yet SSH is extremely safe?</p>