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Not many legal ones, yet, anyway. I'm always struck by how there is basically no mention of bittorrent in conversations about web3. It was web3 (decentralized,
by garbagecoder 5y ago
Not many legal ones, yet, anyway.
I'm always struck by how there is basically no mention of bittorrent in conversations about web3. It was web3 (decentralized, cryptography-based) technology that's about 20 years old. And at first the notion was that people would save on server/bandwidth costs by sharing server/bandwidth for large files. But we still have "Moore's Law" or something like it for Internet connectivity and storage space so it ended up being almost exclusively used for piracy.
This is more or less exactly what is going on with bitcoin. Right now, people are using it here and there for transactions, but not out of necessity really. There are a few cases in certain countries, as pointed out by people like Garry Kasparov, that being able to avoid the authorities is a good thing. But in general, it's an academic argument because the authorities will do what they need to do.
And for a long time, bitcoin was just bittorrent for money. Mostly used for illegal stuff like SilkRoad.
So, while there are a few limited use cases now and may be a lot in the future, "trust me bro, it's gonna rule!" isn't good enough for me to put faith or money into.
- toomuchtodo 5y agoConsider how useful the BitTorrent protocol is, and how little monetary reward it’s creator saw. Hence why web3 does not make much use of it. The web3 get rich quick faction (crypto for $) is at odds with the web3 technology curious/hobbyist faction (crypto for decentralized service discovery [namecoin], non crypto object storage [IPFS], etc).
- feketegy 5y ago^^ This is my feeling exactly. There's a lot of noise and get-rich-quick schemes going on currently.
- garbagecoder 5y agoI'm not suggesting web3 should use bittorrent, I'm suggesting it's not new and we've experimented with these ideas before. I'm interested in the technology too and have been experimenting with blockchains for years, but I never saw it as a new 2022-era thing. Both bittorrent and bitcoin are from the 2000s and we've had plenty of time to see what they can and can't do.