BitTorrent isn't "not practical". It is however less practical than IPFS.
With IPFS, you can effortlessly link from one tree to another, already existing tree.
In BitTorrent, you have to include a .torrent file, or an infohash in some file, but no software that I know of will easily follow that link.
This linking ability is an extremely useful property, that allows you to cheaply create a copy of a merkle tree, with a subset of the data replaced. The tree will operate identically to one created from scratch.
You also don't need to hold all the data to "patch" the tree, which I imagine is useful in this Hadoop filesystem.
Unfortunately there is no real API for operating on torrents. You could say WebTorrent is pushing in the right direction to fix this, but there doesn't seem to be much adoption for it.
With IPFS, you can effortlessly link from one tree to another, already existing tree.
In BitTorrent, you have to include a .torrent file, or an infohash in some file, but no software that I know of will easily follow that link.
This linking ability is an extremely useful property, that allows you to cheaply create a copy of a merkle tree, with a subset of the data replaced. The tree will operate identically to one created from scratch.
You also don't need to hold all the data to "patch" the tree, which I imagine is useful in this Hadoop filesystem.
Unfortunately there is no real API for operating on torrents. You could say WebTorrent is pushing in the right direction to fix this, but there doesn't seem to be much adoption for it.