Having access to a large repository of files without actually downloading the files to your computer already exists at large corporations, but you want a more traditional serving hierarchy in order to get acceptable read/write latencies.
Bittorrent is more useful when 1) local peer transfer speeds exceed the transfer speed from a master copy, and 2) everybody wants an identical copy of the data.
For example, if you want to deploy a new version of Facebook.com to a far away data center, Bittorrent is great (you only have to upload maybe 2-3x the size of the binary to the datacenter, and the thousands of nodes inside the datacenter can share the pieces amongst themselves).
Re:BitTorrent file system
by chrissnell on Saturday January 02, 2016 @02:45PM
(#10827572)
Or... Mounting root as btfs. :)
The basic problem is that very few apps are designed with the mindset that file I/O can take some time. So they'll freeze until you get all of the packets. Even if it only takes 2-3 seconds, that's sort of unacceptable.
In this case, a better experience could be had via a web-to-torrent proxy. Browsers are one of the few apps which don't freeze while waiting for remote I/O...
For instance, think about a LaTeX install. The user could, in a matter of seconds, download a torrent file to a multiple gigabyte repository of all of the fonts an modules that are available. They then run latex on whatever document that they're trying to render. The filesystem would download the libraries as needed, so everything the user needs would be available, but she wouldn't have to wait while downloading a bunch of libraries that she didn't need. Nor would she need to decide before hand which libraries to install or ignore, as everything would be on the filesystem. The user experience of waiting for the executables and base libraries to download whne run for the first time wouldn't be great, but arguable better than waiting for the entire distro to install in the standard case.