How did BitTorrent, the largest decentralized platform on earth, fall?

Core prompt

1. Bittorrent can't get rid of its dependence on the torrent file and can't separate the torrent from the file itself.IPFS USES hash values as identifiers to search for stored content, making it more flexible and able to distinguish between different versions of data, avoiding the problem of duplicate storage.

2. I don't think Bittorrent is important anymore, and it's been for years. Sure, Bittorrent still has a huge user base, but it's not as relevant as it used to be.The reason is that the media industry has evolved so far that Bittorrent no longer poses the threat it once did.

Bittorrent is so popular that Bittorrent consumes 10 percent of all Internet traffic, sometimes more than 50 percent! perhapsBram's Bittorrent achievement is proving the viability of the completely uncensored global decentralized network that satoshi nakamoto envisioned when he conceived bitcoin.

& have spent 4. The decentralized nature of Bittorrent allows the Bittorrent ecosystem to thrive, and even the closure of such a company would have no impact on the Bittorrent ecosystem.soThe baseDesigning a token incentive system for Bittorrent was a huge and difficult process.

The body of the

By Simon Morris, who worked at Bittorrent for a decade as its chief strategy officer. Simon Morris stoodThe Bittorrent perspective tells the story of a decentralized ecosystemBittorrent Inc.是如何陨落。

The end of an era

An era came to an end in early 2018, when BitTorrent was sold to TRON (or, more accurately, its founder, JustinYuchen Sun), a Chinese cryptocurrency organization. BitTorrent became part of TRON. The companies most closely associated with the Bittorrent ecosystem have disappeared in the last 15 years, and the remaining Bittorrent employees are now TRON employees, with the same mission.

I've been with BitTorrent for nearly 10 years, working in product, data science, strategy and general management. During that time, BitTorrent pioneered many decentralized technologies. For example,Content distribution network (CDN)Folder synchDocuments sentP2P communicationOnline publishing and live streamingAnd so on. In the fall of 2017, BitTorrent began working on a project to integrate cryptocurrency into its core protocol, but that project unexpectedly led to the company being acquired.

Bittorrent is probably the most widely deployed decentralized technology out there, and with my 10 years of experience at Bittorrent, I'd like to write a"How has the world of Bittorrent declined and what lessons can be learned from bitcoin and the wider cryptographic world or the blockchain industryShare some thoughts.

I think it's worth starting with the context of Bittorrent. Many people have heard of Bittorrent, and most believe it is linked to illegal online file sharing. This time around, many people will be surprised to learn that behind Bittorrent is a company called Bittorrent Inc.

In talking about Bittorrent, I've been trying to distinguish three different bittorts:

Bittorrent technology- p2p file transfer protocol invented by BramCohen in 2001.

Bittorrent company& have spent - founded in 2004 by BramCohen and AshwinNavin to seek commercial application of Bram's invention.

The Bittorrent ecosystem- a large and leaderless community of users and entities that illegally share popular files online, often media files protected by various copyright laws.

Bittorrent technology                          

Bittorrent is a file-distribution protocol.It is designed to distribute large and popular files over the Internet without having to configure very large servers with very high bandwidthUnlike current cryptocurrency systems, there are no "tokens" in Bittorrent -- instead, the economics behind the system rely on transient barter relationships, where nodes select nodes that have established content-sharing links and go through the process of sharing files. Details of how the protocol works are not important here, but it is important to consider how to protect the founders and the company from direct attack in the later stages of technical design.Bram didn't create the technology with the goal of copyright infringement or making obsolete an industry that for decades sold copies of media files for billions of dollars, but his invention led directly to it

Because Bittorrent hurts so many innocent targets, and because Bittorrent technology is so pervasive because of the illegal sharing of media files, even though it sometimes takes up most of the bandwidth of isps (Internet service providers), isps fail to do anything really effective to eliminate Bittorrent. The broader net neutrality movement was followed by a spate of ominous signals and aggressive defensive actions against Bittorrent. But in the absence of any illegal intent and the existence of what lawyers call "substantial non-infringing use cases," Bittorrent was eventually able to avoid serious interference at the ISP or state level.

Many isps have tried to use Bittorrent as an excuse for government interference, but this has never happened. This is largely because no one wants to set a legal precedent for reviewing a generic technology, just because the technology has a legal use.

(the back story is more complicated, including lobbying by both sides, attempts by many isps to disrupt Bittorrent traffic, and Bittorrent companies tweaking their protocols to make it less aggressive. The broader context is the rapid expansion of Internet bandwidth and the emergence of new applications that use even more bandwidth than Bittorrent. Over time, Bittorrent traffic issues temporarily stopped being a top priority for isps, so they began to focus elsewhere.)

BitTorrent company

BitTorrent has had to deal with other players in the ecosystem since its birth, who have profited from BitTorrent and have often had to apologise for their bad behaviour. BitTorrent Inc still distributes BitTorrent's clients, BitTorrent and uTorrent. The two clients act as distributors for the best use of Bittorrent technology, while the company makes money by selling ads to millions of users. These two clients are far from any infringing activity and constantly update and protect much of the technology running in the Bittorrent ecosystem.

The Bittorrent ecosystem

The Bittorrent ecosystem is made up of people using the technology, and like bitcoin and other blockchain projects, there are many important roles, but each requires a large number of participants.

Key parts of the Bittorrent ecosystem include:

1. Developers and software distributors design their communication systems using the Bittorrent protocol available at bittorrent.org.

2. Operators of thousands of public and private seed sites provide seed file directories and community management mechanisms to help users find files for download.

3. Warez scene - an underground community that collects and uncopyrights files and publishes high-quality versions of movies and other media on the torrent site.

4. Track the operators of the nodes to help peers find each other efficiently (previously required infrastructure, now optional).

5. Hundreds of millions of consumers use torrent to download files in almost every country in the world.

Many of the roles in the Bittorrent ecosystem are natural, with no governance design, no leadership or institutions to manage who does what and when. BitTorrent inc. and BramCohen have long been supporting players in the BitTorrent ecosystem.While Bram is a respected but restrained pioneer of the technology, BitTorrent is increasingly reluctant to sell ads in a way that makes everyone's favorite software obsessed with ads and fails to develop the features the community needs most (mostly around anonymity and content discovery). 

Why was Bittorrent important?

I don't think Bittorrent is important anymore, and it has been for years. Sure, Bittorrent still has a huge user base, but it's not as relevant as it used to be. The reason is that the media industry has evolved so far that Bittorrent is no longer the threat it once was (I'll discuss this in detail in a later article on who wins in the face of decentralized disruption).

What I'm saying here, of course, is that the Bittorrent ecosystem matters. (BitTorrent plays an important role at times, but rarely decisive, and more often avoids leadership roles.) The Bittorrent ecosystem is important for two main reasons:

First, Bittorrent allowed anyone with an Internet connection to share very large files for the first time without any special infrastructure, leading to its explosive growth in sharing large digital media.Bittorrent may not be the first in the field or the latest in technology, but it's almost certainBittorrentIt's the largest operating protocol yet.On Bittorrent technology and Bittorrent company stop exploring part of the wider community using the existing network technology to fill the gaps, provide planning directories and search index, share custody of the public and private community, suggest crowdsourcing rating and reputation rating, in fact standard for naming and coding files and countless other "feature", make original technology has become a thriving ecosystem and available.Bittorrent is so popular that Bittorrent consumes 10 percent of all Internet traffic, sometimes more than 50 percent!

Making all files easily Shared is a fundamental challenge for the media industry, which initially saw the Internet as just another sales channel, like a new file format that could be distributed to vinyl records/cassettes/CDS, giving way to MP3 files, and VHS/DVD to MP4. But this is not the case, because sending a copy of the file to a single user on the Internet means that it is extremely difficult to prevent the file from spreading among other users on the Internet.Bittorrent is the last in a long line of technologies to completely eliminate the file-oriented approach to building a mass-media business model.

Second, the open and decentralized architecture of technology and communities means it is virtually impossible to turn off Bittorrent's Shared files.Other file-sharing systems have come and gone, and there have always been some centralizing Achilles' heel, but Bittorrent continues to insist on decentralization. While different parts of the Bittorrent ecosystem have been subject to numerous legal, regulatory and technical attacks, the ecosystem as a whole remains unaffected and still operates as it did more than a decade ago.In fact, BitTorrent inc. was able to survive the acquisition, in part because it found the benefits of file-sharing through a number of discreet and aggressive attempts. But the bigger reason is that shutting down such a company would have no impact on the Bittorrent ecosystem.It would only eliminate a mid-level constructive partner at the expense of alienating a large number of consumers. Bittorrent users will find other torrent apps they are using, and the ecosystem will not be affected.

What's important about Bittorrent is that, despite its incredibly disruptive impact on the media industry and the proliferation of illegal activity, it's surprisingly resilient. Bittorrent has proved incredibly powerful.Perhaps Bram's biggest achievement with Bittorrent is proving the viability of the completely uncensored global decentralized network that Satoshi Nakamoto envisioned when he conceived bitcoin.

If you don't break the rules, you're wrong!

Anyway, what's the point of decentralization?

Decentralization, at least in Bittorrent,Decentralization actually means a combination of two characteristics -- technical decentralization and organizational decentralization.

Technology decentralization means that applications or networks are not shut down because a single node is attacked and the system is compromised.

Organizational decentralization means that no one person or entity can be forced to compromise to shut down the network.

This is true of the Bittorrent ecosystem. The Bittorrent architecture is distributed across client software, any number of torrent sites, and tracking node servers, meaning that once a large number of people use the technology, the network won't be shut down by an attack. And because Bittorrent technology opened up so early, many companies and individuals developed all the components of Bittorrent. Without a centralized technology company, there is no way to force anyone or any organization to shut down the network. Censorship is hard, at least in the democracies that dominated the early days of the Internet.

This degree of decentralization produces a third key component,The ability to break rules is the most intoxicating and exciting part of decentralization. While a decentralized architecture can effectively route around a wide variety of faults in the network, a decentralized architecture implemented by Bittorrent (and Bitcoin for that matter) can route around real-world rules.

In Bittorrent this happens by accident. Bittorrent's original goal (different from bitcoin's stated goal) did not explicitly support the violations that followed. Still, violations occur on a large scale in the form of documents that enjoy broad copyright protection. And it has been for a long time, in the face of strong opposition from well-funded copyright holders.

This applies broadly to bitcoin and other projects aimed at leveraging blockchain technology. It makes no sense to argue about what decentralization is, how decentralized each project is, and why it is not considered first.In the sense of applying blockchain technology, decentralization is not multi-hosting of infrastructure or sharding or sharing of databases. In this sense, decentralization means creating an uncensored system that makes it possible to break the rules unfetteredThat's why blockchain is so disruptive -- the blockchain that bitcoin and ethereum represent is the essence of disruptive technology. No matter what happens, once the entire network is up, it can't be stopped.

Without the ability to break the rules, it's hard to imagine decentralized blockchain technology being so important.It is like a distributed data store with a complex and slow update mechanism. While some of the features of blockchains are also available with partial centralisation, they are hardly the most exciting thing to come out of the Internet.One value proposition that everyone seems to agree on about blockchain technology is that blockchain is not censored. This is important only if you have something that you want to avoid being censored. In my opinion, the most interesting blockchain projects are those that break the rules.

From this point of view,The only really exciting application of blockchain technology so far is in capital formation, mainly through initial coin offerings (ICOs)The update to the rules on capital formation in the United States and the 2012 Jobs Act are complex and well-intentioned, and I have no interest in discussing them here. I certainly don't want to defend the bad behaviour that came with the ICO boom. But two things are clear:

1. The ICO boom occurred in a way that was not controlled by the government and (albeit briefly) had great success in raising billions of dollars to fund a range of projects;

Icos have come to a virtual standstill because of pressure from the securities and exchange commission and other regulators around the world.

Beyond this example, there's very little that actually breaks the rules. It seems reasonable to assume that if the rules are broken, some people will care. However,There is little evidence that anyone has directly felt the rule-breaking heat of a decentralized blockchain system, just as media executives have felt the rule-breaking heat of the Bittorrent ecosystem.

Not every blockchain project has to be broken,The industry needs many important projects to build the architecture. But I'm pretty sure that the most important thing about this gold rush is being able to build the whole system without centralized control, so that participants can break the rules with impunity. When observers decry the lack of blockchain adoption, the reason is that few projects break the rules that most people want to break. A wave of pragmatic realisation is clearly disappearing.

In Bittorrent's early days, this meant that millions of people simply downloaded The latest movies from The Pirate Bay for free, without any DRM packaging to spoil their fun, and The obnoxious "if you violate copyright, you'll be jailed" page was conveniently removed from all pirated copies. For a while, the Bittorrent experience was better than any other online experience, and it was free.

The closest thing to that in the blockchain ecosystem is a large group of investors hoping to cash in on blockchain's upcoming killer app. butExpectations depend on some utility of the blockchain technology itself emerging elsewhere. Unless that happens, the ecosystem is still vulnerable to charges of a ponzi scheme and could collapse completely.

& have spent The generic common blockchain is best understood as a rule-breaking application platform.Because without breaking the rules, it's tempting to ask why a decentralized architecture is the best tool for this application.If I were an investor, I would ask any app (or DApp) on these platforms: what rules have you broken?

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