01.02.2019
What does the company/project do?
BitTorrent (BTT) allows content creators to connect with their audience, earn and spend digital currency without intermediaries. By connecting the BitTorrent peer-to-peer network to the TRON blockchain, a new experience is possible for over 100 million users.
In early June 2018, Tron founder Justin Sun bought file sharing service BitTorrent for over $100 million.
BitTorrent is the first digital platform for a distributed communication protocol, invented by Bram Cohen in 2001.
The platform uses a peer-to-peer protocol that uses economic incentives to facilitate the delivery of large and in-demand files on the Internet, eliminating the need for a reliable central server.
The open protocol has been in operation for the past sixteen years, operates independently, and is included in the download and installation of the software.
The main priority of the BitTorrent team is to make blockchain technology more accessible and understandable. Once the blockchain is integrated into an already decentralized ecosystem, the BitTorrent team can roll out subsequent strategies targeting communities related to gaming, entertainment, and other media and content verticals.
Features
The BitTorrent protocol was implemented with fair competition between companies supporting various implementations and many popular versions supported by volunteers. In addition, infrastructure providers independently offer additional useful services such as trackers that represent piercings, torrent sites that index metadata in shared files and provide access to their associated torrents.
At the same time, there is client software that implements the BitTorrent protocol. This indicates how many collections of collaborating distributed elements, clients and partially distributed elements, trackers and torrent sites managed to maintain the previous and very resilient ecosystem even in the presence of highly motivated attackers.
BitTorrent protocol
The BitTorrent protocol allows clients to communicate with each other to provide efficient and reliable distribution of large files to many clients. It is able to do this by trying to efficiently use the download and upload bandwidth of each client at the same time. This is done in order to balance the peer-to-peer delivery of content between multiple cooperating clients and reduce resiliency to any weak point.
The protocol runs on a systеm that splits files into pieces and transfers them between multiple devices that try to receive the file at the same time.
The systеm operates in a barter economy, in which clients cooperate based on trade file fragments, each trying to download. Delivery bandwidth is used as a deciding factor.
Key feature
Existing BitTorrent clients will implement an additional set of backward compatible protocol extensions that allow them to bid and receive bids for their bandwidth, working in tandem with a cryptocurrency wallet and staking engine.
The project plans to use BTT in more service cases beyond current bandwidth sharing, expanding access to more services, including shared storage, computing, and resource availability.
Initially, the token will be used in BitTorrent clients as payment in exchange for requesting uplink bandwidth. Usage will expand to additional opportunities, including content purchases, live streaming advice, and crowdfunding to create new works.
BTT tokens
The platform introduces the TRON TRC-10 cryptographic token called BitTorrent (BTT). BTT will serve as a universal mechanism for transactions in computing resources shared between BitTorrent clients and other participating customers and service providers. The token will be the main unit of transactions for the provision of various services.
The addition of the BTT token extends the familiar protocol to create a token-based economy for network resources, bandwidth, and storage resources on the existing Bittorrent network, allowing network participants to appreciate the value of sharing bandwidth and storage.
Users of torrent clients are familiar with issues such as slow downloads and files that become inaccessible over time. By creating incentives for user exchanges, the token will provide faster download speeds and increase the lifetime of the entire network.
Using BTT tokens
The project plans to take the BTT token beyond the current focus on bandwidth sharing and expand it to value-added services related to storage, computing, and resource availability, such as CDN development.
Purchasing downloadable media. Users can purchase downloadable assets directly from the creators.
Tipping live. Allow viewers to tip performers during live broadcasts with gifts, including BTT they have earned by downloading, redeeming purchases, or in other ways.
Crowdfunding for Creative Works: Providing smart contracts that allow fans of creators to accumulate BTT contributions to fund the creation of new works.
Conclusion
Since BitTorrent has been the world's largest decentralized ecosystem since 2001, BitTorrent has a huge advantage over similar blockchain-based content ecosystems.
Controlling 40-50% of the worldwide usage of the BitTorrent protocol, BitTorrent and µTorrent clients connect to a large user base (with 25M DAUs and 100M MAUs) that provides almost a quarter of the world's online content distribution. BitTorrent is responsible for 22% of global upstream traffic and 3% of global downstream traffic (as of October 2, 2018).