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?
I think that the idea of an app “stealing” bandwidth from its users because they want to save money on their own servers is a pretty bad look. Our current world is still not that great w/r/t internet quality, price, and availability, and it was surely worse in the past. It could definitely be more of a thing in the future, but maybe only for stuff used by techy people who could understand it and give proper consent.
I mean, the core idea of the technology - that a single monolithic file can be broken up into a torrent of smaller packets and losing the connection won’t mean that you lose your progress towards downloading the big file - doesn’t require that you also act as a seeder. Personally, I’m fairly sure Steam uses something like this behind the scenes, as their delivery system, because you can interrupt it and it will continue once you resume.
I’m not debating whether Steam is doing p2p or not, but HTTP absolutely supports continuing partial download.
Are you implying that BitTorrent can only be used secretly by apps?
I’m implying that most normal people would not give their consent to it, or would be coerced by the app into giving consent when they don’t understand what it means (e.g. Windows Delivery Optimization).