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?
Pretty sure its being used in the backend by lots of huge things. I remember something about meta/facebook using it for server side stuff. I reckon many companies that have to distribute big updates use it as well like game companies. Its just not being used to liberate users but used to lighten the load on commercial infrastructure.
Valve hired the creator of Bittorrent to write Steam.
He’s a fascinating guy that has worked on a bunch of projects I wish I was smart and productive enough to have worked on
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bram_Cohen
He also firmly denies that bittorrent can even hypothetically be used for piracy (though in his position, you probably have to)
He worked at Valve for like 6 months
The local steam update distribution system probably uses bittorrent or something very similar.