I dunno if this is unreasonable, but I fear dling Torrents with high number of seeders in case one of them is malicious. With Mega you only had to trust one server.
Torrent files have hash check sums of the fragments. If someone sends you a bad fragment it will be discarded.
Magnet links are also hashes, so when you retrieve torrent metadata from your peers from a magnet link that data will also be verified for integrity.
However, if the original torrent itself was made from malicious data then it’s still gonna result in malicious code on your system.
Interestingly though, it is probably far more likely that a torrent with a very low number of seeders is malicious, than that a popular torrent contains malicious data in the files you download.
I suppose it could still be possible that the malicious code sent by a peer was targeting a weakness in your torrent client itself though. And that they could get remote code execution on your computer that way.
The main thing I would worry about with torrents is that your IP could be seen in the swarm by one of the companies that monitor torrent peers on behalf of rights holders and send you a nasty demand for money and threats of legal action.
Malice in this context could mean that they are concerned about someone tracking the activity.
If you are connected to a server, the server is the only connection(and only one with a log) but with a torrent, there are multiple connections so multiple parties could be keeping logs.
SHA-1 has been broken since 2017. It is considerably more expensive to produce a SHA-1 collision than an MD5 collision, but certainly not impossible. However, BitTorrent v2 also came out in 2017 and uses SHA-256, for which no known collisions exist even today.
