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?
I mean, the core idea of the technology - that a single monolithic file can be broken up into a torrent of smaller packets and losing the connection won’t mean that you lose your progress towards downloading the big file - doesn’t require that you also act as a seeder. Personally, I’m fairly sure Steam uses something like this behind the scenes, as their delivery system, because you can interrupt it and it will continue once you resume.
I’m not debating whether Steam is doing p2p or not, but HTTP absolutely supports continuing partial download.