When bittorrent was released, I saw the technological aspects as groundbreaking, thinking it would be repurposed for much more than ISO downloads and mass media distribution. How did the technology not become a more popular way of distributing via crowdsourcing large community datasets, such as openstreetmaps, or something like distribution of Android rom updates, when the costs of distribution are so expensive?


Its used in a lot of places. I’d say its about as essential as FTP, maybe a bit less. Take of that as you will.
I’m thinking of other problems BT could help solve, but I can’t think of any. Maybe decentralized syncing of data across a global CDN network?
Would be great if we could utilize it for video sharing since bandwidth is always a problem there, but its not really designed for it. Though I think there’s a lot of things we could solve with p2p, bittorrent may not be the correct protocol to use. A decentralized p2p marketplace was mentioned a few years back, but I can’t recall any detail or even name now…