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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.
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.