BitTorrent and Tron
Chances are you already know what BitTorrent is. It’s the world’s largest P2P decentralized network, boasting hundreds of millions of unique users scattered all over the planet. The network is for sharing files of all kinds (movies, audiobooks, software, e-books, and anything else you could imagine) and it’s been around for a very long time.
Being massive, successful and already decentralized, BitTorrent’s values and praxis line up remarkably well with Tron’s ambition to use blockchain technology to disrupt the web and decentralize it completely. Which is why Tron bought BitTorrent a few months ago.
The idea is to turn BitTorrent into a blockchain network (based on Tron’s blockchain, obviously) that will keep up, and even improve, the current network’s performance. Additionally, it will reward seeders (which is BitTorrent’s slang, it refers to the people who keep their files online for others to download) using a brand new Tron-based token called BitTorrent Token (BTT).
The marriage between Tron and BitTorrent is called “Project Atlas,” and we’re going to see its first fruits in this very quarter as a new service called BitTorrent Live.
BitTorrent Live
BitTorrent Live is going to use the BitTorrent network to power a live streaming service. It will enable users to create live videos, connect with other users with similar interests and even earn money as they get rewarded in BTT for their contributions to the network.
It will be 100% blockchain technology and protect privacy and ownership while offering means of payment based on cryptocurrencies. The Beta testing phase we’ll see during this quarter will be the first step only in this fascinating project.
The new streaming network in question has a huge potential. In time, it could become more critical than Youtube. Content creators will surely like it because there will be no centralized authority that decides which videos can be monetized, or not, so it will give them a lot more freedom as they will be able to live without the eternal fear shared by all of youtube’s content creators: demonetization of a particular video for whatever reason YouTube fancied.
It will also be a significant step in Tron’s agenda to decentralize the whole world wide web. The new service, will not run on the web, of course, but on the new blockchain-based BitTorrent. Think about this: Netflix and YouTube account for about 25% of all internet traffic in the world, and Tron’s new streaming network will challenge that dominance directly, even outside of the web.
Tron‘s taking decisive steps in delivering the project’s ambition to decentralize all sources of content on the internet, and some have been pretty impressive. It’s already the blockchain network with the highest number of decentralized applications and users. But from all the successes previously achieved by the project, this could be the most important one, if only because the size of BitTorrent’s network is so vast.
So will the new streaming platform thrive? We’ll have to wait and see what happens. But it has the potential to be revolutionary and create a massive nightmare for YouTube and many other content management platforms on the internet.
Image courtesy of Pixabay.
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