How did this get so popular?
My dad and I did not see eye to eye growing up. It wasn’t his fault. I was a bad kid. One time he called me into the living room to give me the business. His face was bright red like a strawberry. My dad’s Black. This meant he was beyond pissed.
What did I do this time? Bad grades? Too much fighting with my sister? Nope. I downloaded too much illegal content — and my internet service provider ratted on me.
At the time I used a website called The Pirate Bay to download everything for free including movies, video games, textbooks, music, audiobooks, applications like PremierePro and porn. I was 13. Give me a break.
The Pirate Bay was only one part of the equation, however. What you really needed to get all these stolen goodies was a free internet application called ‘BitTorrent’.
BitTorrent is still around today, and not only that, they have one of the best performing cryptocurrencies on the planet called BTT. Torrenting will play a huge role in Web3, so let’s talk about it.
BitTorrent Beat Satoshi Nakomoto
BitTorrent is the world’s largest peer-to-peer file-sharing service. What does any of that mean? I’ll tell you.
Typically, when you download files somewhere online they are downloaded from one centralized place like a website. However, in file-sharing, those files are coming from dozens of users who already downloaded them.
The users are sharing the files with you on the BitTorrent network.
File-sharing is like giving each of your friends the same puzzle and then trying to build one single puzzle out of it. If someone loses pieces then another friend can help out by providing them from their box.
Do you know what this means?
Decentralized peer-to-peer networks did not begin with Bitcoin or its creator Satoshi Nakamoto. It began with file sharing (and 90s open web tech), which dates back to 1999. In other words, file sharing is one of the most important technologies in modern history.
How BitTorrent Escapes the Law
“The war against illegal file-sharing is like the church’s age-old war against masturbation. It’s a war you just can’t win” — Lawrence Lessig, Professor of Law at Harvard
BitTorrent is running in more than 138 countries and has over 100 million active users. How? Like seriously — how in the fuck?
The government desperately wants to kill file sharing forever. Pirated video material gets over 230 billion views a year and video piracy is costing the US economy between $29.2 and $71 billion each year.
All that being said, the government can not shut down file-sharing services. It’s not possible.
The Pirate Bay doesn’t actually host any illegal content. It’s more like a phone book where you can easily look up where to download files from all the users who downloaded it previously. As for BitTorrent, that’s just a tool. It can be used to download legal and illegal material online.
Moreover, there’s nothing wrong with sharing content I paid for with someone else. I can’t go to jail for lending a video game to a friend.
It’s a big grey area, legally speaking.
The last point to consider is that since there’s no centralized server where these downloads are happening there’s no single person or party to blame. Especially if these people use virtual private networks (VPNs).
As with Bitcoin and Ethereum, you can never shut down file-sharing entirely. It’s too decentralized to fail.
Is the BTT Cryptocurrency Worth it?
BTT was a major hit in 2019 with almost 60 billion tokens sold in minutes after its official launch.
The token was engineered by Justin Sun and the Tron Foundation, creators of the Tron blockchain. BitTorrent’s modus operandi is serving as a utility token for the BitTorrent network offering faster download speeds and financial incentives to torrenting.
Essentially, whenever you’re done downloading a file you can help others by re-uploading it to earn BTT. This process is called ‘seeding.’
Here’s the rub: BitTorrent doesn’t need BTT token. Torrenting is massively popular on its own and doesn’t need a coin to make it much more of a success. While many centralized sectors of the economy can benefit from crypto, file sharing is not one of them. Stick with BTC, ETH, DOT, and MATIC.
Final Thoughts
File sharing will become a pillar for Web3. More companies will want to avoid big tech censorship efforts and ostensibly overcome centralized points of failure in data storage.
However, most of that will be completed through better-decentralized file storing projects like Storj, Arweave, and the Graph.
BitTorrent helped me a lot growing up. I used it to pirate college textbooks and video editing software when I was dirt poor. There token, however, leaves a lot to be desired.