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?

  • PieMePlenty@lemmy.world
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    13 hours ago

    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…