You still have to talk to specific machines to get the data, so having it content addressable will not automatically make it either more or less rapidly availab

You still have to talk to specific machines to get the data, so having it content addressable will not automatically make it either more or less rapidly available. Also, even for a peer-to-peer network, you still need some way to discover the peers that actually have the data, so you need some kind of centralized infrastructure that can help coordinate. Ultimately whether you connect to a CDN or to the centralized P2P facilitator is not such a massive difference. Also, given the way ISPs typically operate, you will probably have much better bandwidth downloading from a centralized server than from a generic other end-user. This is why BitTorrent only really has two successfully deployed use cases: 1. Windows updates and similar, where machines can rely on broadcasts on a small LAN to coordinate without needing more complex infrastructure (doesn't scale beyond LAN) 2. "Piracy", where the major advantage is that it diffuses the blame for copyright infringement, instead of presenting a single large target that holds all of it.