This is a really myopic view on uses of crypto and the BitTorrent protocol. There's so much more going on than criminal applications.
BitTorrent is used in a lot of settings for data distribution and for software distribution. Saying it's just for pirating reveals the author's laziness. Several of these use-cases are listed in the wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BitTorrent
As for crypto, I recommend people read about Bitcoin being used for the purposes of sending remittances to start.
Also the author laments that bittorrent is not used for 1:1 transfers. Bittorrent's strength is in distributing bandwidth for popular files. Direct file transfers between people who know each other isn't really its target. So i feel that's a pretty unfair criticism.
You don't always need to take over the world to be succesful. Its fine to have a niche and just do that really well.
I think Bittorrent could be made usable for 1:1 transfers. The building blocks are there. But you'd have to streamline the process and build a client optimized for that case instead of the more common usage. The main missing piece would be a standardized encryption format. That doesn't really need protocol changes, just a storage-level convention how the data is encrypted before turning it into a torrent.
I'm not sure I see the point though?
For 1-to-1 transfers, Magic Wormhole is the system to beat, and I struggle to imagine how it could be improved.
I really wish magic wormhole worked conveniently on windows without obliging me to install python and pip and such. It's my go-to when sftp isn't an option, but for sftp not to be an option almost always means that one of the computers I'm trying to transfer between is a windows box.
https://github.com/psanford/wormhole-william
Windows binary: https://github.com/psanford/wormhole-william/releases/downlo...
There's GUI: https://github.com/Jacalz/wormhole-gui
Android app too: https://github.com/psanford/wormhole-william-mobile
The author is on HN as psanford