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?
It is widely used.
However it also has downsides on a technological level: by design it’s a lot of connections which can be an issue so it doesn’t work everywhere, especially playing well with other communications.