Before Bitcoin, BitTorrent proved that a decentralized, trustless, and censorship-resistant network could operate at global scale, making it a conceptual precursor to bitcoin. Although nobody gives it that credit for some reason.

a kid from school showed me how to use bittorrent and explained how it works and it changed me. I developed my first strongly held political beliefs from this experience

Now that i think of it the first time I had any inkling of an understanding of bitcoin, was connecting it to bittorrent works. The name bitcoin might even be an homage to bittorrent. Satoshi mentioned it in one of his first emails.