I dunno how often it happens to you, but it happens to me all of the time: I go to download a big file, and tons of people are already sucking up the bandwidth, so you get nowhere. This is an easy problem to solve given the tools that already exist, and I'm at a loss to figure out why someone hasn't already fixed it.

So, the overview is that I'm about to describe how we can turn the problem upside down: instead of it slowing you down when tons of people go to download a big file, your download rates would improve the more people go after it.

Step 1: Make browsers support bittorrent as a first class protocol. This would mean that when you click on a .torrent link, the browser would automatically kick off a torrent client and start the download, then when the download completes the browser would render the resulting file just like it was downloaded normally. If the file is something the browser knows how to render, it would just display it (e.g. a picture or an html page) and otherwise it would let you run the file from the browser (e.g. a wmv file or whatever).

Step 2: Provide a service that automatically torrents. This would be a service like the coral cache, but for bittorrent. You would hit a special URL within that server (e.g. http://autotorrent.net/some other server/path to a file on that other server.torrent). If no torrent exists for the file provided by that URL, one would be created and seeded with the original file. If it already exists, you would just get back the existing torrent file.

What Step 2 would provide is a way for you to access any file as a torrent, whether the original publisher provided it as a torrent or not.

Step 3: Make the browser give you an option to right click on a link and download it through the service provided in Step 2, as a torrent. Just clicking the link would work as normal, but if you right click and select "download via bittorrent", it would use the autotorrent service. Optionally, you could configure the browser to automatically stop a download that has a crappy dl rate and try the autotorrent link instead.

So, why don't I just write this magical plugin for Firefox? I just might...