BitTorrent $BTT Wiki: Coin History, Techstack, and Crypto News

BitTorrent is a peer-to-peer file-sharing communication protocol that allows users to distribute electronic files and data on the internet in a decentralized manner.

History

The BitTorrent protocol was created by programmer Bram Cohen in April 2001. The first version of the protocol was released on 2nd July 2001. This version did not have a search engine or peer exchange. Files were created through the creation of text files known as torrents that could be uploaded to a torrent index site.

BitTorrent gained distributed tracking that allowed the use of distributed hash tables which allowed clients to trade data directly without needing to create a torrent file. Peer exchange functionality was created on the protocol in 2006.

BitTorrent v2 was created on May 15, 2017. It was intended to work with initial versions of the BitTorrent protocol.

BitTorrent was purchased by Justin Sun in July 2018 for $140 million. Sun is the creator and founder of TRON. TRON announced the creation of the BitTorrent Token (BTT) in January 2019. The BTT was created to improve BitTorrent’s content delivery, privacy protection, and the platform’s file storage.

BTT was sold in two markets in January 2019. It sold 59.8 billion BTT for around $7.2 million within a few minutes of its Initial Coin Offering.

Biggest Claim to Fame

The use of BitTorrent can reduce the network and server impact caused by the distribution of large files. The protocol allows for several home computers to replace large servers but still distribute files to several recipients. This causes lower bandwidth usage thereby helping to prevent large-scale internet traffic in an area, ensuring internet speeds are higher for all users whether they use BitTorrent or not.

Biggest Criticism

Users used to pay for BitTorrent’s service in bandwidth and not money. This changed when BTT was created. Initially, people contributed some of their devices' processing power which allowed the network to use that power within the duration of the content download or after. This stopped after the introduction of BTT where it was argued that the currency could broaden the scope of functions BitTorrent could offer.

BitTorrent faces the problem of copyright infringement. Since all their data is from and to consumers, content is easily passed around without consideration for the content creators’ copyrights. It is difficult to follow up on every single person who gave or received a file individually on the platform as it has millions of users. This has caused a problem for content creators who do not know how to deal with the issues caused by BitTorrent.

Torrent files reveal the IP address of both the ones sending or receiving a torrent file. This is dangerous as the IP address can be used to access your device and any sensitive information kept on it. In this day and age, a public IP address can be used to access location, internet usage, and computer storage, as well as any information stored on a cloud that the computer has access to. This is a major problem and setback on the use of BitTorrent.

There is no way to verify the contents of a Torrent unless there are comments present. There is no way to tell if the content getting downloaded is genuine until it is fully downloaded and the user opens it. This is a problem, especially for large files that require massive amounts of data and storage space. It may take a user a long time to download only to find out after several hours the torrent is a false one.

Team

BitTorrent was created by the American computer programmer Bram Cohen. He went to the University of Buffalo. He designed the BitTorrent protocol in 2001 and released the initial version in July 2001. He created the Chia Network in 2017 where he works as the CEO.