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BitTorrent and Tron Hope Other Clients Will Embrace Blockchain-Powered 'Paid' Seeding (torrentfreak.com)
BitTorrent and Tron, following the acquisition, hope to successfully integrate blockchain technology with the popular file-sharing protocol. From a report: Both companies were built around decentralization, which makes for a good match. However, it doesn't stop there. BitTorrent and Tron plan to integrate blockchain technology into future releases of their torrent clients. In short, they want to make it possible for users to 'earn' tokens by seeding. At the same time, others can 'bid' tokens to speed up their downloads. The new plan is dubbed "Project Atlas" and BitTorrent currently has seven people working on it full-time. In theory, the incentives will increase total seeding capacity, improving the health of the torrent ecosystem.
"By adding tokens we'll make it so that you can effectively earn per seeding and create incentives for users not only to seed longer but to dedicate more of their bandwidth and storage overall," Project Atlas lead Justin Knoll says. The idea to merge the blockchain with file-sharing technology isn't new. Joystream, previously implemented a similar idea and Upfiring is also working on incentivized sharing. BitTorrent itself also considered it before Tron came into the picture. "Even before the Tron acquisition, our R&D team was looking at ways to add blockchain based incentives to the protocol. Now with the addition of Tron's expertise, we can accelerate that effort," Knoll says. BitTorrent says it will start implementing the technology in its desktop clients, such as uTorrent. After that, it intends to bring it to mobile. The company is additionally encouraging developers of other BitTorrent clients to follow suit. "We'll release the details of our implementation and encourage third-party clients and the whole ecosystem to implement this," Knoll was quoted as saying.
"By adding tokens we'll make it so that you can effectively earn per seeding and create incentives for users not only to seed longer but to dedicate more of their bandwidth and storage overall," Project Atlas lead Justin Knoll says. The idea to merge the blockchain with file-sharing technology isn't new. Joystream, previously implemented a similar idea and Upfiring is also working on incentivized sharing. BitTorrent itself also considered it before Tron came into the picture. "Even before the Tron acquisition, our R&D team was looking at ways to add blockchain based incentives to the protocol. Now with the addition of Tron's expertise, we can accelerate that effort," Knoll says. BitTorrent says it will start implementing the technology in its desktop clients, such as uTorrent. After that, it intends to bring it to mobile. The company is additionally encouraging developers of other BitTorrent clients to follow suit. "We'll release the details of our implementation and encourage third-party clients and the whole ecosystem to implement this," Knoll was quoted as saying.
Now all they have to do is add mobile app technology and social media to BT and investor heads will explode!
Hasn't mainline bittorrent been a giant piece of ad-serving spyware since forever ago?
But if you're paying me to seed torrents of things I'm pirating, then not only will that make it easier to find, arrest, jail, try, and convict me of piracy, it'll make all the above worse, because I was getting paid to do it.. No thanks, I'll just leave my illegal downloading of things I wouldn't pay for anyway payment-free, and preserve my anonymity as much as possible.
So, there will be a cryptographically irrefutable record that you uploaded stuff to torrents?
This literally sounds like they've created the tools to allow prosecutions for willful copyright infringement, with a record of who did it.
Yeah, I don't see that causing you problems at all.
Tribler has had a blockchain integrating anonymous bittorrent downloading for quite awhile now. Shame you can only really get it working via microsoft github.
GENERATION 26: The first time you see this, copy it into your sig on any forum and add 1 to the generation.
'Paying' more to get your data faster. Where have I heard this before....
The fact that you can see the IP of every peer is terrible.
I spent a while thinking about doing this a few years ago. I am not convinced that it is worth the overhead. The implementation needs to deter various ways of trying to game the system.
You can try to keep the size of the blockchain down by only keeping a few months of transactions, client software can automatically retain older points by moving them in the block so you only loose old points if you don't run your client for a few months.
For this to be practically useful it needs to allow people to use their points to buy access to rare files that are otherwise unavailable. Downloading a file two hours sooner isn't worth downloading tens of GB of blockchain and spending a load of cpu time doing math to verify it. Most people stop uploading shortly after their download finished, letting some people finish torrents a few hours faster may be overall worse.
Taking a wild guess about the numbers. ed2k has lots of old and rare content, around 150K concurrent users. A bitcoin transaction is about 250 bytes. Wild guess that an average client uploads to 100 other clients in a day. That's 3.75GB of blockchain per day. Optimise it to a quarter of that and clients need to store
90GB for the last 100 days of the blockchain. If you have not used your client for a week you need to download 6GB of blockchain before you can verify another client offering to give you points for you to send them some data.
If you meet someone at McDonalds to swap your bitcoin for their cash then there is a trust problem. What if Mr Shady gives you his bitcoin address on a piece of paper, you send him 1 internet point then he just stands up and walks away. The police will be no help, if he admits anything he will say you paid the wrong address or something. The deterrent to theft is that you might be so angry that you stab the guy. Sending him 0.01point, waiting up to 40 minutes for it to be in the blockchain, he gives you a small amount of money and repeat for a slightly larger amount takes all afternoon.
Similar scenarios apply to this trade-points-for-data idea. What if someone writes a client that offers desirable content that it does not even have in return for points and just takes your points without transferring any data? (It can be the other way around as well) Various ideas to mitigate that add a load of overhead.
Formerly Enron INC.
There is a big difference between the emule credit system and a blockchain system.
Emule credit only has any value when you are downloading from a peer that you previously uploaded to. If a peer has a rare file that you want but you have never uploaded to that particular peer then the credit system does nothing. All emule credit does is that clients keep count of how much data they have exchanged with other clients and lets only clients that have uploaded to them move up the queue faster.
A blockchain system could allow transferable points. You get some points for uploading to peers A, B and C. A month later you find that peer D has a rare file that you want. Peer D wants points so you do a deal.
Everything is a nail, if you refuse to use anything but a hammer to solve problems.
Not only will this keep a record of everything you ever seeded, but it will soon become a pay-to-play system as it has in other areas where money was introduced.
Is it going to work over IoT using end to end enterprise solutions?
http://wiki.tron.network/en/la...
More or less fidelity bond & witness oracle, nothing interesting here (Sia and storj are the more popular implementation of this idea).
TRON however for the most part lacks any sound design, it is similiar to NEO (who also made a bid for bittorrent), LISK, Nano, Maid etc. A hodge-podge of exceptionally poorly designed supernode network architecture, initially (and perhaps indefinitely) controlled by authors, Incentive and economic structure is intentionally obfuscated (it tends to come to light only after "investors" start screeming murder after dump, so just wait until the jig is up).
What a sad end for BitTorrent. Then again, the company is long gone producing anything of use (most innovation came from pre-acquisition utorrent and now is on the side of other clients).