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Comment by computerfriend | Hacker News Reader

Sharing arbitrary copyrighted content did not ruin BitTorrent so I don't see why it would ruin this.

Did it not? I would consider Bittorrent traffic to have a very high risk of being blocked or viewed as suspicious, and as a result almost never gets embedded in other use cases. Even the simple use case of using torrents to have peer-to-peer delivery of software updates has flopped.

It looks like there’s still an Arch Linux BitTorrent tracker; maybe I’m out of touch but I think this is not a very uncommon way of distributing distros (?).

Granted, you've found the one (and only?) notable exception to the "no legitimate torrent use cases" rule that I can think of. :)

And this has a legacy roughly as long as BitTorrent itself. The fact that BT never established a footing in other use cases (even those where you would think it would be a great solution) is telling.

Blizzard used BitTorrent for distributing full games, patches and trailers for years.

https://wowpedia.fandom.com/wiki/Blizzard_Downloader

I had forgotten about this, this is an interesting exception.

Windows Update also allows the user to opt in to use a non-bittorrent protocol for peer-to-peer delivery of updates to other Windows users. But of course, it's not true Bittorrent.

That’s fair, I never got into torrenting for illegal purposes but even I had the feeling that we were acting as the thinnest veneer of legitimacy when torrenting distros, haha.

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