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?
The costs of distribution aren’t so expensive for anything but the largest amounts of data (video)
You can grab a digital ocean server droplet for $6 per month that allows a Terabyte of transfer. That’s 0.6 cents per GB, and includes the compute to actually be able to serve that data as well as the transfer amount.