BitTorrent and Tron Hope Other Clients Will Embrace Blockchain-Powered 'Paid' Seeding

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.

Blockchain technology added?

[Spy Handler]

Now all they have to do is add mobile app technology and social media to BT and investor heads will explode!

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[vlad30]

What the **AA's couldn't do Bit torrent wants to do, kill file sharing the whole point is to share the files and help each other for free we all end up paying something already in electricity equipment space etc. Please note whats killing the web is people skewing the web results due to paid advertising imagine getting paying money for a file only to learn it was my little pony or worse instead of the documentary you were after

wake me when somebody else does it

[bistromath007]

Hasn't mainline bittorrent been a giant piece of ad-serving spyware since forever ago?

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[DarkRookie2]

uTorrent did around version 1.8 IIRC. That is when I stopped using it
I am not sure about the BitTorrent bittorrent client thou but it classified as adware on Wikipedia.

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[Agripa]

uTorrent did around version 1.8 IIRC. That is when I stopped using it.

I thought the last good version of uTorrent was 2.2.1 build 25302.

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[CanHasDIY]

Use Deluge, no ads there.

But then I'll get arrested and convicted faster

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

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[Anonymous Coward]

not just paid, but tracked with a digital ledger of everything you have ever seeded!

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[mark-t]

Wouldn't that be the case only if you are downloading infringing content in the first place?

Seems like it could prove your innocence just as easily, if you happened to be sharing a torrent that was legal for you to distribute, but someone flagged your IP as suspicious for some reason or another.

Just sayin'...

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[TFlan91]

In what world are you downloading legal torrents?

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[mark-t]

Examples [makeuseof.com]

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[tepples]

I'm typing this onto a laptop that came with Windows 10. I used Transmission for Windows briefly to download Xubuntu install media using BitTorrent, and while I seeded it back, I read up on install issues for this model and prepared the USB stick.

MPAA/RIAA will love this ...

[Anonymous Coward]

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

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 beat them to this

[themusicgod1]

Tribler [tribler.org] has had a blockchain integrating anonymous bittorrent downloading for quite awhile now. Shame you can only really get it working via microsoft github.

Bitron!

[Zorro]

Formerly Enron INC.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

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[Mr. Dollar Ton]

But blockchain is no ordinary hammer, blockchain is the only hammer that can make every problem behave as nail.

buzzword overload

[malditaenvidia]

Is it going to work over IoT using end to end enterprise solutions?

What does it technically mean

[ezdiy]

http://wiki.tron.network/en/la... [wiki.tron.network]

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 obfuscat