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Napster is one of the two or three products that spawned a completely different world, entirely tossing established and antiquated rules on their head. Of cour
by veg 5y ago
Napster is one of the two or three products that spawned a completely different world, entirely tossing established and antiquated rules on their head.
Of course, very directly, Spotify would not exist without Napster.
But a step further, it opened the eyes to end-users about their collective power, and the beauty of distributed distribution. It was the first proof that "regular" users would buy into such a thing. Napster, in many ways, gave birth to BitTorrent, Bitcoin, and all of the derivative work thereof.
- marcodiego 5y agoI think p2p was so successful that the music industry had to change. They had to be more convenient or would lose all the control on media distribution. Users of modern streaming services owe a lot to p2p users of early. Evidence: https://www.visualcapitalist.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/physical-vs-digital.png https://www.visualcapitalist.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/...
- geoduck14 5y ago>Napster, in many ways, gave birth to BitTorrent, Bitcoin, and all of the derivative work thereof. You say that, but before Napster, there was Seti(?), a program that would search for extra-terrestrial life - by distributing the work load on top your personal laptop
- ativzzz 5y agosounds like bitcoin mining without making money
- nitrogen 5y agoSETI@home and Folding@home at least provided intrinsic value from their computations. It'd be nice if we could have a coin based on protein folding or climate simulations or something.
- c0nducktr 5y agoThere's at least one coin that does that. It's a Nano clone (not sure if clone is the right word), called Banano. You "mine" it by joining their folding@home team, and you get banano based on how many folding@home work units you complete. It's pre-mined though, so maybe that doesn't quite fit. There was another cryptocurrency I remember which was mildly popular years ago called Primecoin, which attempted to find a certain type of prime numbers. It's interesting, but I'm not sure if it ever provided any actual usefulness from the work performed. I don't see any reason that a cryptocurrency couldn't be tied to something like protein folding or climate simulations. People just don't choose to do so.
- jerkstate 5y agoahh that was distributed.net
- rrrrrrrrrrrryan 5y agoHow funny - you must be a little younger. When bitcoin mining first became a thing, it felt like they'd found a way to make distributed computing (like the seti and protein folding projects) profitable.
- nitrogen 5y agoSETI@home: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/SETI@home https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/SETI@home That was distributed computation, but all the data was coordinated and stored centrally.
- utahsaint365 5y agoWithout blank CDs and burners, Napster wouldn’t have happened.
- tim-- 5y agoI'm not sure if that's true. It's more likely that without MP3 players, Napster wouldn't exist.