Torrents may still be mostly associated with illegal content, but that's just a portion of a much larger and wider reaching issue. In fact, BitTorrent is going to great lengths to change that image and show how it can be the payday for authors; and now goes even further with this Project Maelstrom, a torrent powered browser for a free and decentralized web.
It's not by chance that pirates use torrents for file sharing. It's probably the most efficient way to transfer data even if you have just a home connection and want to share to millions of users. But this doesn't stop with file sharing, BitTorrent Sync provides us with a file syncing "dropbox-like" tool using torrents, and now they aim to change the face of internet itself with Project Maelstorm.
Traditionally, a web page is hosted on a server, somewhere, and sent to the browser on your computer when you want to see it. If a site has millions of viewers you'll need more powerful servers and internet connections. Using this Maelstorm browser, that won't be the case, as each viewer will also be helping to ease the load on the server, sharing information in a decentralized way. Something that will also make it a lot harder for anyone to try and block any single website.
For now, Maelstorm (which uses Chromium as it's base) is in closed alpha, meaning it will only be available for a small number of testers. But we hope its development to come along swiftly and bring us a censorship resistant web for the future.
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