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BitTorrent Founder Bram Cohen Has Left the Company (theverge.com)

Posted by BeauHD on from the parting-of-the-ways dept.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: Bram Cohen, a co-founder of BitTorrent, the company which oversees the development of eponymous P2P protocol, has left its board, he told TorrentFreak. The revelation comes weeks after the file-sharing service provider said it had been acquired by blockchain startup Tron. It remains unclear exactly when Cohen, who also served as a lead engineer at the firm for years, made the decision to part ways with the company. He hinted to TechCrunch last year that, as of August, he was no longer involved in the day-to-day operations of the company. The departure of Cohen underscores BitTorrent's long battle to find a lucrative business model. The company, the services of which are used by more than 100 million customers, has long struggled to find new applications of its platform and avenues to bring home some cash. In 2016, the company announced a mobile music and video streaming service [called] BitTorrent Now, which it abruptly shut down months later while also firing its co-CEOs. Last year, the company shut down its much hyped live streaming service BitTorrent Live, which Variety described as a brainchild of Cohen.

2 of 53 comments (clear)

  1. TIL the torrent protcocol somehow needs a company by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Question: Why does the company even need to exist?

    From an outsider's point of view: The protocol is already implemented, so what does the company do, and where does it get its income? BT users don't exactly seem like the paying type to me, nor the type to tolerate advertisements, so does the official bittorrent client contain a coin miner or something?

    How does this company get paid?

  2. Chia Network by mcelrath · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Bram founded a new company, https://chia.net/ which is making a new bitcoin-derived crypto-currency based on Proof of Space and Time. Basically it fills the unused space on your drive with entropy, and uses this like a set of lottery tickets instead of Proof of Work mining. They're also focusing on features of the crypto-currency that will enhance "Layer 2" (like http://lightning.network/) to enable scalability. In an economic sense this construction shifts the costs of mining toward capital expenditure (for storage) instead of electricity consumption.

    He and a collaborator recently won Best Paper at Eurocrypt 2018 for a Zero Knowledge Proof of Time https://eprint.iacr.org/2018/1... (presentation: https://cyber.stanford.edu/sit... )

    Interesting things are coming from Bram.

    --
    1^2=1; (-1)^2=1; 1^2=(-1)^2; 1=-1; 1=0.