[mathnmusic]

Sure, S3 is also cheaper than torrents. And HTTP/Telnet is cheaper than HTTPS/SSH. But some people do see value in math-based guarantees over those given by governments and courts. And others don't. We need both approaches to keep each other in check.

[astrange]

Isn’t S3 actually expensive because cloud computing platforms charge so much for outbound bandwidth? That’s how they stop you from moving across providers.

[Hamuko]

>S3 is also cheaper than torrents

On what formula? Because if I have a 500 MB video file and I want to distribute to some tens of maybe even hundreds of people, I don't see S3 being cheaper. Just sending out 500 MB from S3 to the Internet 10 times costs between $0.25 and $0.45.

There's a reason why I didn't touch S3 when I had to transfer up to 1 TB of video content per day to clients.

[mathnmusic]

"Cheaper" for a use-case like hosting static assets for your website/webapp. Torrents have high overhead which only becomes justifiable for big files and high latency being acceptable.