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.
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.
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.
"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.
