Tron and BitTorrent - What's Next?
Justin Sun the founder of Tron announced to the staff of his two companies that they would be looking to create a fully democratic Internet over the next few years. Insiders of the file-sharing scene, however, have considerable concerns. When converting the bittorrent network you could do a lot wrong. Also, Sun has not mentioned any details in his speech, as this completely decentralized Internet for now to look in detail.
In June, Justin Sun bought the company, which since 2004 has been responsible for the care and development of the BitTorrent network. The associated protocol was designed in the early 2000s by Bittorrent Inc. co-founder Bram Cohen. To date, no right holder has managed to bring the use of the BitTorrent protocol under their control. At times, it consumes up to one-third of the world's total data volume. Despite warnings sent to copyright infringers in many countries, this form of file sharing plays a very important role to this day.
Tron's CEO, Justin Sun, told his employees he was not buying more than 100 million active users worldwide when they bought BitTorrent. And not to the incredible commercial opportunities that are associated with such a large community. BitTorrent Inc. has always been about democratizing the Internet. And one of Tron's main goals is to decentralize the Internet. That's why the two companies would work so well together. He will spend all his life working towards those goals. However, Sun also said that it will take 10 to 20 years to get there. At the end of the way, an Internet should be free of any monopolists like Apple, Google or Amazon. The "Web 4.0" should be completely decentralized and transparent.
BitTorrent: Will there be 1st and 2nd class users?
Sun has already announced at the end of July that they are considering a reimbursement system for Seeder (Uploader). These are the people who upload files to third parties via their Internet line to optimize the availability and speed of P2P transfers. But this would turn the character of the peer-to-peer network on its head, because there financial aspects should actually play no role. As payment, the remuneration would be offered by means of a cryptocurrency. As an operator of its own blockchain plus cryptocurrency, Tron's implementation would be anything but a problem. Sun had previously announced that all BitTorrent users should become part of the Tron ecosystem. However, it is questionable in this context, who should pay the Seeder? The operator will hardly want to do this out of pocket, because all previous attempts to monetize the company have failed. Neither the advertisements that were displayed in the software nor their own online shop brought the hoped-for breakthrough.
It will probably pay in the end the downloaders who want a higher speed. Then, however, the planned Web 4.0 would have nothing to do with net neutrality or equality of all participants. Then there would be normal users who get their data slower. And there would be participants with a thick wallet who can afford to buy the speed advantage. If one were to pay the Seeder in a cryptocurrency whose trace the police can not follow, then this would be a vision of the future for the creative industry, which could not be more gloomy. For Hollywood and the record labels, this would be even more dramatic than the resurrection of Megaupload, Hotfile and RapidShare together. Without anonymous payment, however, this system of remuneration would raise serious criminal and civil law issues. After all, P2P usually distributes black copies and no legal content. The announcement raises so many questions on which the new operator must first find a suitable answer.
What's up: a change or a lot of hot air?
Unfortunately, just a few details are mentioned in Justin Sun's speech. How exactly the digital revolution to achieve the democratic "Web 4.0" is to be performed, Sun does not do. He just explains where we are at the moment. He intends to improve Tron's and BitTorrent's protocols. They also want to develop a suite of distributed apps and create new protocols for decentralized online storage services. Due to the lack of details, there is much room for speculation and interpretation. The P2P blog TorrentFreak concluded his remarks with the words "we will report then in 10 years with an update" from. Fitting one could not have brought the contribution to an end.