I've said this before on HN, but let me reiterate it here: Bitcoin is very easily compared to BitTorrent. Everyone's falling all over themselves, much like people did in the early 2000s. People thought that BitTorrent was going to "change the world" -- and sure, it helped catalyze the inevitable media distribution revolution of the past decade (Netflix, Hulu, Amazon, iTunes, Spotify), but where is BitTorrent now? That's right: it's mostly used to download stuff illegally.
Similarly, BTC and ETH provide no immediate value when compared to fiat currencies. Their main functional (that is, non-philosophical) upside, like TOR, for example, is to do illegal shit. Sure, there are various incidental benefits (like privacy), but this is a misdirection: businesses have been able to hide fiat currencies in off-shore accounts for decades.
One of the big pros of BitTorrent is that it allows you to download huge files over an extended period of time on a slow connection. Back in the day when torrents were starting to take over things like Limwire/Kazaa, this was a big deal. This was also in the days before video hosting (i.e. YouTube and, frankly, PornHub) and cloud storage were a mainstream thing.
Also, due to peering, torrents tended to allow you to max your connection compared to shady direct-download websites which required premium membership (e.g. Rapidshare).
BitTorrent is still a viable solution for big files and slow connections. Some scientific datasets are available via torrent for this reason.
Media distribution has certainly helped kill off torrents (I say kill off, they're still widely used, damped perhaps?), but another part of it is faster connection speeds, no bandwidth caps in many places and the availability of cheap file hosting (e.g. via Mega).
> I say kill off, they're still widely used, damped perhaps?
I would say "delegitemized".
Media companies have worked hard to convince the general public that data can be "owned", and that "piracy" is literal "theft", meaning that pirated content creates some loss they can claim as damages, thereby filling the fifth part of the legal definition for fraud.
The media oligopoly wants to provide encrypted data (DRM), which isn't static (changing keys), and therefore won't scale on bittorrent.
> but another part of it is faster connection speeds, no bandwidth caps in many places and the availability of cheap file hosting (e.g. via Mega).
That is certainly a major part of it. That, and the association bittorrent has with piracy are why most people don't think to use bittorrent to distribute static content.
> it helped catalyze the inevitable media distribution revolution of the past decade
Just because the tightly entangled media oligopoly chooses to ignore its usefulness does not make it worthless.
Bittorrent is extremely useful, dependable, scalable, and usable.
Bittorrent can be used in any situation where static data is distributed to many peers. It's the static part that doesn't mix well with DRM, and therefore gets ignored by media distributors who are convinced they are obligated to "protect" data from its fundamental ability to be copied.
Filecoin or whatever Bram Cohen's project is called, is very interesting. Bitcoin and other blockchains store all data on every node which can be wasteful, but for file storing just having 1/100th or 1/1000th of the nodes would be amazing coverage.
I haven't looked into Filecoin, but (in general) the topology of the block-chain is terrible for file storage (off the top of my head: the block-chain itself ends up being massive and the blocks end up being of variable-size).
Similarly, BTC and ETH provide no immediate value when compared to fiat currencies. Their main functional (that is, non-philosophical) upside, like TOR, for example, is to do illegal shit. Sure, there are various incidental benefits (like privacy), but this is a misdirection: businesses have been able to hide fiat currencies in off-shore accounts for decades.