If only we could have a truly distributed system for storing content addressed blobs ... perhaps using IPFS for docker images. This way you could swap the hosting provider without having to update the image references
I’d love for others with more knowledgeable to chime in, since this feels close to the logical end state for non-user-facing distribution.
At a protocol level, content basically becomes a combination of a hash/digest and one or more canonical sources/hubs.
This allow any intermediaries to cache or serve the content to reduce bandwidth/increase locality, and could have many different implementations for different environments to take advantage of local networks as well as public networks in a similar fashion as recursive DNS resolvers. In this fashion you could transparently cache at a host level as well as eg your local cloud provider to reduce latency/bw.
I’m not super well versed, but I thought BitTorrent’s main contribution was essentially the chunking and distributed hash table. There is perhaps a hood analog of the different layers of a docker image.