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Tron's CEO Wants To Use Blockchain Games and BitTorrent To Decentralize the Internet (venturebeat.com)
From a report: Last summer, Justin Sun, the 28-year-old CEO of Tron acquired BitTorrent, the 15-year-old file-sharing company that is one of the biggest decentralized networks in existence for $140 million. He wanted to take advantage of blockchain, the decentralized ledger that is both secure and transparent, and combine it with the decentralized file-sharing app, offering crypto rewards to those who share their computers for file sharing. And this week, Sun appeared on stage with former basketball star Kobe Bryant at the NiTron Summit, which drew more than 1,000 attendees. Tron has also created a $100 million fund to convince game developers to make games that use Tron's protocol and its TRX cryptocurrency. The promise is to create a crypto network that is both fast -- at 2,000 transactions per second -- and reliable.
I interviewed Sun backstage at the NiTron Summit, where he said he wanted his company to become the major blockchain platform that could one day be the decentralized alternative to the centralized internet networks of Google, Facebook, and Apple. But to make that happen, Sun has to get mainstream people like the 100 million BitTorrent users to trust cryptocurrency, even after a coin market slide that has wiped out billions in value, including taking Tron's TRX market value down from near $20 billion to $1.6 billion today.
I interviewed Sun backstage at the NiTron Summit, where he said he wanted his company to become the major blockchain platform that could one day be the decentralized alternative to the centralized internet networks of Google, Facebook, and Apple. But to make that happen, Sun has to get mainstream people like the 100 million BitTorrent users to trust cryptocurrency, even after a coin market slide that has wiped out billions in value, including taking Tron's TRX market value down from near $20 billion to $1.6 billion today.
That's a big door
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
What the accountants thought? Or did they just do some hand waving and say the distributes ledger would capture all the untold value?
> But to make that happen, Sun has to get mainstream people like the 100 million BitTorrent users to trust cryptocurrency, even after a coin market slide that has wiped out billions in value, including taking Tron's TRX market value down from near $20 billion to $1.6 billion today.
Getting most people to trust cryptocurrency isn't going to happen, unless you assume most people are stupid. Fortunately for him, it seems most people are indeed stupid. Just watch the mindless herds of millions of drones the first Tuesday of November.
The promise is to create a crypto network that is both fast -- at 2,000 transactions per second -- and reliable
First you get it fast and then you get it right - right??
If the universe is someone's simulation -- does that mean the stars are just stuck pixels?
How does one "decentralize" a network that's not physically built upon those principles? Does decentralization mean I'll have multiple wires leaving my home?
The first real useful idea for using blockchain to date
Get your crypto token shit out of here porky scum.
People love bittorrent because it's communist, and neoliberalism would be a massive step backwards. The internet is naturally free and post-scarcity, and markets just make everything worse.
Editors should throw out blatant shilling like this, but then they'd have to work to find stories.
TRX tokens are simply tokens on the Ethereum blockchain. I will never trust Ethereum after the bullshit they pulled, more than once too.
#DeleteFacebook
I mean, everything is cryptocloudblockchained these days.
does the queen know of this? without crown royal approval there's no chaining of blocks?
because what ends up in them are 100% locked - noone can alter the information without altering the blockchain globally.
Git, being a kind of blockchain, has the same problem: you can't alter an old commit message, after you have shared the commit.
Therefore: don't lock things into blockchains unless it is really important it stays locked.
In the Git world it is good to uniquely identify a revision of some source code tree, but the trouble comes when people try to add - and are becoming dependent on -some other information attached in the commit message.
Things that you might have to correct later can not be stored in a blockchain like that. Money in a blockchain is stupid: you trust machines and programming too much. Errors happens and sometimes it can be nice to be able to call your bank, get hold of a human and get things corrected.
The company name is ENCOM. Tron is just a program.
Fuck no.
The Grid. A digital frontier. I tried to picture clusters of information as they moved through the computer. What did they look like? Ships, motorcycles? Were the circuits like freeways? I kept dreaming of a world I thought I'd never see. And then, one day I got in...
We stop listening to undereducated and underskilled millennials. The perspective of a 28 year-old pretty much applies only to them and their circle (the same is not true in reverse - our perspectives tend to become more universal with time). Enough of the bullshit, already. This idea is absurd, as is nearly every idea that comes out if millennial Silicon Valley. It's not going to work on a planet we all share with billions of other individuals. I honestly believe that millies are devoid of an understanding of that concept with their conformity and hive mind.
Because OBVIOUSLY mashing blockchain together with bittorrent is the way to create an email service, search engine, social media site ... And my point that I've made before countless times, blockchain solves NO practical problems. If you thought that the problem with Facebook was that you didn't have a local copy of their database to look through, I'd love to sell you the hardware to run your new blockchain distributed copy.
Look at banking for an easy to understand example. Blockchain proponents like to point out unspecified countries where the banking system is untrustworthy. Do you really think that in a country where you have to worry about the banks being inaccurate, that someone else will have a better chance of having a stable enough internet connection and the hardware to update the multiple-hundreds-of-gigabytes blockchain DB for bitcoin AND have an exchange method to local currency that is somehow immune to the banking problems? If you looked long enough you might find a handful of examples that fit, but its nothing close to a common scenario.
Bitcoin has been blockchain's only successful use case so far, and only there on the black market.
Why not?
All buzzwords in a single marketing claim!
Sent as ripples into the electromagnetic field. No single photon has been harmed in the process.
What need to be done is stopping to centralization of the Internet!
You trusted Ethereum? You also trust Amway and Herbalife?
I don't respond to AC's.
It's just becoming an overused, overhyped term by CEOs (an even CIOs) who neither understand nor use it correctly.
Internet is a decentralized platform. It is currently centralized (minitel 2.0 kind of thing) not because of technical problems. It is easy to run your own blog, your own webserver, etc..
The problem is mostly social. Device makers are allowed to keep their platform closed. So if you want something iPhone compatible, it pretty much has to play ball with Apple; and if they don't like it you are screwed. But the issue of running stuff on the iPhone is not a technical issue, but a social (legal) one. It is legal for Apple to shutdown any attempt at opening the iPhone.
Similarly, one can only play PS4 games online on Sony's platform. It is not that we don't have the technical knowledge to make PS4 online games compatible with Xbox's, PC's, or smartphone's. The fundamental problem is social: Sony can force you to play through their network alone and can mess with you if you don't play ball.
I could go on for other platforms, but that is typically where the centralization actually comes from.
This is just a dumb article. I'm stupider for having read it.
Et Tu Slashdot.
Translation:
"Cryptocurrencies are STILL the future people & they are totally not modern PONZI SCAMS at all!!!
Don't be scared & keep HODLing!!!"
@HODLers:
Take out your head from the sand & look around objectively to see reality!!!
I've spent most of my professional life in Venture Capital, specifically in writing intelligence reports about individual venture capitalists, and in writing pitch decks for $500k-$5m pre-series-A funding rounds for startups. Doing this work for almost 30 years, I've learned some rules about what to invest in, and what not to invest in. One thing that's become pretty clear is this: Do not invest in companies that are named after a movie that came out when the Founder/CEO was -9 years old, especially if Disney actually owns the TM on the company name.
- In Soviet Korea, only old people loose all their bases to Natalie Portman's petrified hot grits overlords.
One of the first things the summary should do is tell us about TRON. Who they are, what they do, ect. Think, motherfucker, think!
Please! You can't do that until you find a way around the ISP. Google and Facebook are nothing. They can't cut your wire.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
Centralized control of an otherwise decentralized solution, open source or otherwise, is just you having a free ride on the back of your users. It does not make you any less proprietary than Microsoft Windows and Office, Mac OS, Tivo or any other vendor locked-in tech out there.
Crypto-currencies thrive on the "a sucker born every minute" principle. Oddly enough, plenty of people are still dumb enough to fall for the scam.
Was that supposed to sound inightful?
No, it was not supposed to be inightful.
Why do people think you can just buy a company then revolutionize the internet?
I didn't do a great job of making my point clear.
> Medium of exchange refers to being a universally accepted token of value, unlike a barter economy where you need to find someone who has what you want to barter with.
Right, universally accepted value. The key words being "accept" and "value". Meaning most people (universally) will say "I'll _accept_ 20Money for this item I'm selling". Most people don't in any way accept *coin, or even appear to accept it. Those that appear to don't accept *coin at a certain _value_. Some online stores use a payment servicer that processes via *coin, but the _value_ they offer to _accept_ is "$20 worth of *coin". The _value_ they put on it is denominated in US dollars.
Why wasn't this guy arrested by the US government? He's involved in massive fraud!
It's always been semi-centralised. I think you have the problem wrong though. It's discovery. The vast amount of data on the internet is just too much to handle without aggregation and curation services, and those are where much of the centralisation now lies. If I post a video on my own website, no-one is going to see it - but if I put it on youtube, people will. Even if people had a properly decentralised hosting platform like bittorrent or IPFS to store data, it'd still need centralised services to find it, and those will be subject to the usual economy of scale effect: No-one wants to use a social service which has no users on it. The bigger they get, the more useful they are, so naturally one or two platforms will rise to total dominance.
A fan, user, supporter can ensure more of their funding gets direct to a project, game, software they want to support.
Without the party political ability of a CC company, payment platform, online payment system to block/ban/report a payment.
That a payment network wants to take 10% to 30% of the money sent.
The p2p part allows data to move around the world out needing a digital distribution company with political considerations to approve the content.
The internet is free again without the CoC, politics and virtue signalling of a few payment systems, CC, digital distribution networks.
Users help other users network the content they like.
Creators get more support direct for users.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
i2p. No need to reinvent the wheel.
Universal in this sense means within a certain economy, such as the US. Compare Marvel universe, DC universe.
Everybody in the US either a) has to pay taxes or b) buys things frim someone who has to pay taxes, so everybody has a need for dollars.
So I can get paid to keep seeding my Linux ISOs? Sure, why not?
I just hope they'll make this opt-in and/or anonymize any data related to the content each person is seeding. If not, this sounds like a great hole for the RIAA/MPAA to exploit. What good is a VPN if they can look through the blockchain's transaction records to find out which torrents you're being paid to seed?
Oh, wait, I remember. First people said "Internet" when they meant "World Wide Web". Now apparently they say "Internet" when they mean [-Insert social media platform of choice here-].
The Internet is intrinsically and by definition decentralized. Despite certain companies efforts to change this it really truly is the nature of the beast.
Uses of certain protocols are not so much, such as email, which seems to only work these days if you have a valid reverse DNS entry (Apparently owners of IP space are the email equivalent of historical landed gentry, the rest of us are tenant farmers)
But the Internet is and remains decentralized. However most people only see the internet through the lens of a large social media portal, so their experience is very centralized and controlled, but we don't say that transportation is centralized in large cities because many people choose to not own their own means of transportation.
But back to TFA, this guy doesn't actually seem to want the Internet decentralized, he wants the social media users to all use his protocols to do what they do. It isn't decentralizing, it is Uber vs. taxicabs. Sure we can take you where you want, when you want, but you still have to pay us a non-negotiated set fee, which might even change based on the weather.