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This is the official HackerNoon wiki for BitTorrent. As part of our , this living wiki displays on . If you’d like to suggest edits to our official BitTorrent wiki, please submit them in the comment field below, a real human editor will read and review your suggestions for accuracy and publication. coin price pages BitTorrent crypto price page 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. This is the official HackerNoon wiki for BitTorrent. As part of our , this living wiki displays on . If you’d like to suggest edits to our official BitTorrent wiki, please submit them in the comment field below, a real human editor will read and review your suggestions for accuracy and publication. coin price pages BitTorrent crypto price page

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

A lawsuit filed against BitTorrent owner Rainberry Inc, TRON Foundation's Justin Sun, and one of his colleagues, is based in employment law. However, the allegations it contains could pique interest in Hollywood, with claims that movies including The Lion King were involved in a "fraudulent scheme" to "make a profit from the illegal piracy of those materials." In 2018, Justin Sun’s Rainberry Inc. BitTorrent Inc. successfully acquired While the name Rainberry is rarely used in public, company brands such as BitTorrent, TRON, and TRX are more easily recognized by the public, with controversy rarely far behind. Developments related to these various brands are usually followed closely by the cryptocurrency press, mainly due to Sun’s voluminous tweets that tend to focus on crypto matters, rather than the file-sharing activities of the uTorrent owner. This was also the case yesterday when sites including began reporting on an employment law dispute that was quietly filed last October by a pair of former Rainberry Inc. employees. However, this development also has an interesting copyright angle that hasn’t been explained in detail. Coindesk Richard Hall worked as a product manager at the company while Lukasz Juraszek was employed as an engineer, at least before they were dismissed. Their 70-page lawsuit is a trip through many serious allegations, including racism, threats, the witnessing of physical violence, and a number of closely related matters. However, concerns over Rainberry’s exposure to copyright infringement issues appear to lie at the root of the legal action. “Defendant Justin Sun and his hand-picked mainland Chinese-born subordinates were engaged in illegal piracy of copyrighted materials for defendant Rainberry Inc., in order to make a profit from the illegal piracy of those materials, as well as other illegal and unscrupulous activities,” the lawsuit reads. Both Hall and Juraszek characterize themselves as “whistleblowers” who were subjected to a campaign of harassment after they raised concerns over activity at the company. The lawsuit claims that their employment at Rainberry was terminated following their “outright refusal to engage in criminal violation of state and national statutes concerning piracy of intellectual property”, including Hollywood first-run films. Hall claims he was assigned by the company to work as Senior Director of Product Management on the emerging file-sharing product known publicly as . He says he raised concerns with his superiors that depending on the architecture and implementation of caching and delivery algorithms, users of BTFS might be monetarily rewarded (via crypto tokens, such as BTT) for “unknowingly storing and distributing inappropriate content” and/or copyright-infringing material. BitTorrent File System (BTFS) These complaints, Hall suggests, resulted in him being demoted in a manner that prevented him from overseeing the BTFS product. Nevertheless, he says he sought out proposals from two law firms specializing in copyright law to provide estimates for a legal review of what Rainberry and TRON were preparing to do, specifically for BTFS and another product called BTFS Movie or BT Movie (the lawsuit uses both). However, the lawsuit claims that following discussion with Justin Sun, it was determined that no legal review would be carried out. According to Hall, he advised that the ‘Movie’ product should be renamed, so that outsiders wouldn’t be given the impression that the company was encouraging the illegal sharing of movies on the BTFS network. Shortly after, his employment was terminated on the basis that he was “not a fit” for the company, Hall claims. “[I]t become clear that Richard Hall was terminated because he raised legitimate legal concerns about the actual or potential for BTFS and associated BTFS Movie projects to be engaged in illegal activity and pirating of copyrighted materials that Justin Sun did not want to have investigated because it would delay the launch and reveal the illegal and nefarious activities in which the company was engaged,” the lawsuit reads. In July 2019, Lukasz Juraszek reports that he realized that BTFS was no longer a “demo app”. As a result he began to step up his concerns over the application because the company had no control over the content being posted on BTFS “which at the time was entirely hosted on TRON’s infrastructure.” According to him, the Movie app was then “handed off” to Rainberry’s “Mainland China” office for implementation “by end of July 2019.” In August 2019, Juraszek says he again raised concerns that illegal content could be downloaded from BTFS, that he was uncomfortable working on the project, and that attorneys should be consulted before further work was done on BT Movie. He later carried out his own investigations by accessing the TRON “BT Movie” website to check if illegal content could be found. According to him, he found a Chinese-subtitled version of The Lion King (which was still in cinemas) along with Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, Godzilla: King of the Monsters, Hobbs & Shaw, Avengers: Infinity Wars”, and “many, many others.” On August 20, 2019, following what appears to be several strained interactions with management on a variety of topics, Juraszek was reportedly dismissed for “sharing company information” with a third-party. How the lawsuit will progress from here is unclear but the former Rainberry employees are demanding $15 million in damages. For his part, Justin Sun is mounting a vigorous defense, demanding that the complaint is dismissed in its entirety and the plaintiffs paying his costs. The complaint can be found with answers from Justin Sun and co-defendant Cong Li and (all pdf) here here here Originally published as “ BitTorrent Owner Accused of Profiting From Movie Piracy ” with the Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported (CC BY-NC 3.0) license

Lawsuit Filed Against BitTorrent, The Company Accused of Illegal Profiting

The State of The Market — January 29, 2019 : $3,438.11 (-0.66%) : $0.291144 (-0.06%) : $105.76 (+0.70%) BTC XRP ETH The crypto market continued to fall down yesterday, with Bitcoin testing its support at $3,400. While Bitcoin defended the price point, it was not a strong rebound. The market could test the support multiple times this week. If Bitcoin successfully manages to hold on to it, it could result in a significant rebound propelling Bitcoin’s price above $4,000. Meanwhile, most cryptocurrencies have changed by less than 1% in the last 24 hours, and not all of them are following Bitcoin. In other news, . Analysts believe the move highlights weakness in the wider cryptocurrency market as sharp downturns typically lead stablecoins like USDT to rally. Also, according to a recently issued press release. Nvidia expects weaker sales from its gaming and data center platforms and Q4 revenue was revised to $2.20 billion from a previous estimate of $2.70 billion. The crypto-bull run of 2017 drove an incessant demand for Nvidia’s graphics processing units (GPUs) but as mining profitability and cryptocurrency prices decreased throughout 2018, customers became disinterested in crypto-mining and GPU prices did not drop low enough for new consumers to purchase more affordable cards from Nvidia. Tether (USDT) has eclipsed EOS market capitalization to take over the #4 spot on CoinMarketCap Nvidia, a Taiwan-based computer hardware producer, has revised its Q4 2019 revenue estimates While there was a list of technical issues that angered some users, the sale was viewed as a success. The sale began at 3:00 UTC and purchasers had the option of paying in Tron’s TRX or with Binance’s native exchange token, BNB. At the time or sale, BTT was priced at $0.00012. The minimum BTT purchase was 100,000 BTT ($12). Tron CEO Justin Sun tweeted that BTT’s 23.76 billion token cap for the BNB session was met in 13 minutes and 25 seconds, and the TRX session was completed in 14 minutes and 41 seconds. Data from Binance shows there was 622 participants in the TRX session and 340 participants in the BNB session. Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao said that the sessions would have ended in just seconds if there were no technical issues and he described the demand as being “astronomical”. ( ) 1) On Monday a public sale of 59.8 billion ($7.2 million) BitTorrent Tokens (BTT) sold out in minutes through Binance’s Launchpad. Read More An Italian Bankruptcy Court has now declared that the hack was the fault of its owner Francesco Firano (also known as “The Bomber”). The court has ruled that Firano must return as much as possible to his customers. Firano’s assets worth $1 Million and millions of dollars worth cryptocurrencies was seized. Also, the court has appointed several trustees to assist distribution of assets back to victims. Bitgrail victims declared it was a huge victory for the crypto industry. ( ) 2) Nearly one year ago, cryptocurrency exchange Bitgrail claimed to have lost 14 Million NANO (worth approx. $170 million at the time) to a hack. Read More Charlie Lee, who is the creator of Litecoin, wants to add Confidential Transactions to Litecoin on an opt-in basis and he is targeting 2019 to do so. Lee pointed to the controversial fungibility feature, which reflects the identical nature of tokens, as “the only property of sound money that is missing from Bitcoin and Litecoin.” He says with the scalability issue in the rear-view mirror, fungibility and privacy are the “next battleground.” Lee went on to announce that he is “now focused on making Litecoin more fungible by adding Confidential Transactions.” While Lee does not expect Bitcoin to go down a similar path, at least not yet, the stars have aligned for Litecoin. ( ) 3) Litecoin might be considered the silver to Bitcoin’s gold, but it’s transforming to more closely resemble Monero. Read More Subscribe to the Berminal Brief Newsletter Download Berminal App for Free The Berminal Website Berminal Official Telegram Berminal Twitter

BitTorrent Token Sale Sells Out In Minutes And Bitgrail Victims Win Case Against Founder

BTT ICO announced for 1/28, airdrop for 2/11 TRON was the third top mover this past Monday with its cryptocurrency TRX jumping 5.03%, now the 9th largest cryptocurrency ranked by market capitalization, according to . This coming off the heels of its debut , a developer conference held in San Francisco last week that impressed even the most skeptical in the EOS community. ForbesCrypto Markets NiTROn Summit TRON’s charismatic 28 year old CEO and founder, Justin Sun, took the stage during opening remarks proudly donning his BitTorrent hoodie and talking about how its recent acquisition of the legendary peer-to-peer network that pioneered distributed file sharing makes it the largest decentralized ecosystem in the world. In pursuit of BitTorrent’s 100 million monthly active users, with a drama that spanned the first half of last year, Sun beat out several other blockchains including Neo which, according to , offered $170 million, nearly $50 million more than the $120 million bid from TRON. Both blockchains had similar market caps at the time (Neo at $1.5 billion, Tron at $1.6 billion) but Sun’s commitment to speed to market helped seal the deal. Coindesk In an emotionally charged moment, Sun talked about the tough times TRON suffered when the ICO ban came down in China on September 4, 2017 and how they were forced to move and start again in San Francisco. Sun , “No matter how bad, we never give up.” said Sun is a Forbes 30 Under 30 entrepreneur who launched Peiwo (China’s Snapchat), began his career at Ripple and was mentored by Alibaba founder Jack Ma. pegged his TRX holdings over the summer at around $4.78 billion. Just watch the cinematic Tron to see his marketing prowess at work. It might just be what consumer blockchain needs to get to mass adoption. Variety trailer TRON trailer, The Future is Now Focused on recruiting the next generation of blockchain developers to grow the TRON ecosystem, Sun’s hope is that by providing funding and user acquisition support through programs like its recent , TRON will become the platform of choice for developers. $1 million accelerator There can only be one Taking direct aim at EOS, Cong Li, Head of the Developer Community at TRON, presented a slide that simply said “#3” as he showed off data to support the claim that TRON is now the third largest developer community. Cong Li, Head of Developer Community at TRON presenting stats at NiTron Summit in San Francisco last week (photo credit: Martine Paris) TRON’s style of blitz scaling, a popular business tactic in China, has been a lightning rod for controversy among blockchain developers since it came on the scene a year ago. Vitalik Buterin, the founder of Ethereum, accused Tron of outright its white paper and many in the community continue to voice skepticism over TRON’s numbers. plagiarizing Following the NiTron Summit, podcaster Dallas Rushing, founder of , an EOS social rewards app, took a closer look at the stats of the two platforms. In his most recent , he provides valuable insights into the differences in wallet creation, transactions per second, and other key metrics. KARMA video EOS v TRON: The Race To Mass Adoption, Podcaster Dallas Rushing comparing EOS to TRON All About BitTorrent The biggest news of the show came in the form of details surrounding the of BitTorrent. tokenization The BitTorrent Token ($BTT) will become exclusively available on Binance Launchpad on excluding U.S., China and other restricted jurisdictions and then airdropped to TRX holders on February 11 with monthly airdrops continuing for the next six years. Read more about it and . $BTT will allow BitTorrent clients to bid for, and earn in exchange for, allocation of upstream bandwidth, and then later used for purchasing content, tipping livestreaming performers, and crowdfunding the creation of new works once BitTorrent’s livestreaming feature launches which, , could be some time in 2019 if everything goes as planned with BTT. January 28, 2019 at 7am PST here here according to Sun Justin Knoll, who oversees the BitTorrent integration aka Project Atlas, allayed concerns about those not wanting to participate in the new token economy by saying it was an optional extension. He explains more : here TRON’s Justin Knoll explaining the tokenization of BitTorrent Still some are questioning how BitTorrent will move forward in a world of the token and . haves have nots I asked Pavan Katepalli, Solutions Architect at Consensys, if he thought the tokenization of BitTorrent would work. “I don’t think so,” he said, “because the users of torrents are using them because they don’t want to spend money, and the system has worked without any money entering in for 15 years. People share files for free. TRON should embrace the massive infrastructure that BitTorrent is and compete with AWS.” He added, “Tokens could incentivize people to share content that isn’t easily available, but they might as well buy it then or stream it. When I was a kid, I used to watch anime and I downloaded this entire series and I kept sharing it for a year because I wanted to help others watch it. That’s the kind of community BitTorrent has.” Fred Krueger, an influential voice in the EOS community and Founder of EOS Lynx, a mobile cryptowallet, was a bit more optimistic. On his Facebook post titled, “A Few Thoughts on Tron and TRX” he wrote, “I am up here at the SF Tron summit … Tron has actually managed to build a dApp platform that works. Many of the same kind of apps that work on EOS work just fine on Tron. The BitTorrent acquisition *may* just work. Tron is going to give these 100MM monthly users tokens that can be used for priority service / better downloads etc. This is absolutely a legitimate idea and depending on the implementation it might actually get some uptake. Even a 1% uptake would make Tron bigger than EOS. I’ve learned over the years not to underestimate scrappy looking companies. Tron may very well implode, the BTT ploy may fail, etc… But they seem to be tapping into a completely orthogonal market to EOS and ETH and making real numbers. I would 100% keep a close eye on it.” He added, “Funny thing at the conference, a lot of these users simply have not heard of EOS. Parallel universe.” Poppy Pop-Up Justin Sun at Poppy Pop-Up Shop taking selfies with fans and showing off swag available with the GRID Troncard. (Photo credit: Martine Paris) During the “Token Economics” presentation, Juliun Brabon, co-founder of , a TRON Super Representative, announced that with preloaded TRX were being distributed to attendees to use at a nearby Poppy pop-up shop. I didn’t have a chance to activate my card but I did have a chance to who was on hand to meet fans and show off how to use the card. Currently in private beta, GRID Troncard is being promoted as a way to buy, hold and spend TRX anonymously with interest on the balance, no fees, and a way to recover your TRX if lost or stolen. The Poppy POS allows retailers to process TRX payments similar to the way enables retailers to accept Bitcoin in the form of a prepaid VISA card. This too could be another path to mass adoption. Sesameseed GRID Troncards selfie with Justin Sun Bitpay YouTuber Ben Armstrong aka shared his excitement over the announcements with me. “BTT was a nice surprise and I’m interested to see how they line up retailers for Poppy. Once Amazon and Walmart start accepting crypto, that will be a game changer.” BitBoy (Preview of my article for The FinTech Times posting Saturday, January 26) Watch Dallas Rushing, : EOS v TRON: The Race To Mass Adoption

TRON Summit: How BitTorrent will drive mass adoption for the blockchain

TRON Reveals New BitTorrent File System Based Upon IPFS

is a method used to distribute files over the internet. A torrent file contains metadata about the contents to be distributed. In addition to metadata, a torrent file contains a list of trackers. The torrent file itself doesn’t contain the file data but contains file and folder names and their structures. Torrenting How Torrenting Works Torrenting is the process of downloading and uploading files using . BitTorrent works by splitting a file into hundreds or even thousands of pieces. Those pieces are gathered and assembled to create the original file with the help of BitTorrent clients on the users’ computers. BitTorrent This helps users download the required files with ease, irrespective of their size. The BitTorrent protocol, after being introduced, became a huge success and was a game-changer. Some special terms in BitTorrent that might help you understand it better: : The server that initially distributes the torrent file is a seed. Seed : Any machine that downloads the torrent file from the seed and also shares the file with other devices is a peer. Any peer that has a complete file downloaded can also act as a seed. Peer : A peer that does not share its data fragments with other peers after downloading is called a leech. Leech : A swarm is a network consisting of seeds and peers. Swarm : Tracker is software that helps in coordination between different peers for file transfer. Tracker The best torrent sites always have high-quality content and a hefty number of seeds available. There are lots of torrent sites flooded with ads, trackers, malicious code, and fake torrents. Therefore, it is always recommended to use a decent while accessing those ad-filled torrent sites. In this article, I’m going to discuss some of the best torrent sites available on the web right now. ad blocker 1. The Pirate Bay It is the oldest (20 years old) and most popular torrent site. With a monthly user base of nearly six and a half million, it is clearly the current king of torrent sites. Due to such a massive load, this site often goes down at regular intervals. That kind of massive user base at the Pirate Bay hosts a good amount of seeded torrent files there. 2. 1337X After being started in 2007, 1337x only started to gain popularity in 2016 after the end of the popular torrent provider Kickass Torrents that year. Now 1337x ranks among the top torrent sites with a large user base. The site is famous for having all kinds of torrent files, like movies, music, documents, and many more, that users can download with a decent amount of seeds and peers. Fun fact: The “1337” in the name of this site represents the word “LEET”, which in fact depicts “Elite”. 3. RARBG It is often popular for its smooth user interface which allows users to search for torrent files instantly. The site has been in operation since 2008. This site is blocked in 17 countries for legal reasons ( copyright infringement) including Australia, India, and China. This site doesn’t allow users to upload on their own. 4. YTS With a beautiful user interface and a huge library of movies that users can search and download, YTS is easily the most popular torrent site for movies. Many users also claimed YTS was the “simplest movie torrent downloader”. Users can download their required torrent file at a decently high speed from YTS. There are also various options to download files according to the network speed and quality of the user. 5. LimeTorrent Also known as the most trusted torrent site, LimeTorrent has a huge database that consists of nearly 10 million torrent files. The database is regularly updated, since every day many more new files get uploaded. The average download speed of LimeTorrent is around 2.5 megabytes per second, which is pretty decent. Even if it is banned in countries like the UK, France, and Australia, LimeTorrent is able to maintain that large user base, which is remarkable. 6. TorrentDownloads Having a larger database with high-quality torrents makes this site a top choice for many users. That’s because of the high-speed download it provides. This site is popular for having classic and older files that users cannot find elsewhere. 7. Torrentz2 Torrentz2 is another popular torrent site that also has millions of visits every month. This site, despite having all kinds of files available for download in its database, is most popular for music. The most special thing about this torrent site is that it fetches files from more than 90+ torrent sites. People generally use Torrentz2 as an instant alternative to other sites they use. In the past year, Torrentz2 used to have spammy and misleading links, but with time, they have improved their site. 8. IPtorrents This is a different type of torrent site than the ones listed above. They are public torrent sites that can be accessed by anyone. IPtorrents, on the other hand, is a private torrent site that you will need an invitation to enter. To download torrent files from here, you need to pay a certain amount. The site being private is much safer, and it is also one of the biggest private torrent sites because of its huge database. Final Thoughts on the Best Torrent Sites It is recommended that you do not use torrents for illegal activities. You can download copyright-free items without any legal issues. However, for some privacy, always use a good torrent VPN. Using such a VPN helps you protect your identity, increase download speed ( by preventing ISP throttling), etc. These days, torrent sites are now restricted in some countries due to the censored content they contain. Some bad torrent sites were also banned after they were found using users’ CPUs for crypto mining. Torrent sites can be banned or blocked at any time. If one goes down, another takes its place. Despite the fluctuations, people’s love for torrents is still at an all-time high. Don’t forget to always use a reliable site to download torrents, and don’t forget to use a VPN.

8 Best Torrent Sites That are Still Working in 2023

The world's oldest active torrent file turns 18 years old this month and it's still being seeded by dozens of people. "The Fanimatrix" torrent was published in 2003 when BitTorrent was still a relatively new protocol. At the time, the torrent's creator saw it as the only affordable option to share the Matrix fan film with the world. BitTorrent is an excellent distribution mechanism but, for a file to live on, at least one person has to keep sharing it. This means that most torrents eventually die after the public loses interest. However, some torrents seem to live on forever. The Fanimatrix The oldest surviving torrent we can identify is a copy of the Matrix fan film “ .” The torrent was created in September 2003, which means that it will turn 18 this month. A remarkable achievement. Fanimatrix The film was shot by a group of New Zealand friends. With a limited budget of just $800, nearly half of which was spent on a leather jacket, they managed to complete the project in nine days. While shooting the film was possible with these financial constraints, sharing it with the world was a bigger challenge. At the time there were no free video-sharing services and YouTube had yet to be invented. No Money For Distribution Hosting the film on a private server wasn’t an option either. Bandwidth was still very expensive, especially in New Zealand. If the project was to be a success, the friends would have to pay many thousands of dollars extra to distribute it. This is when one of the friends, Sebastian Kai Frost, went looking for other options. Frost had a bit part in the film and also operated as the ‘IT-guy’. After searching for solutions, he eventually stumbled upon a new technology called BitTorrent. “It looked promising because it scaled such that the more popular the file became, the more the bandwidth load was shared. It seemed like the perfect solution,” Frost told us . earlier BitTorrent to the Rescue This was exactly what was needed to get the Fanimatrix published worldwide. So, after Frost got the green light from the rest of the crew he created a torrent on September 28, 2003. To ensure that everything ran smoothly, he also ran his own tracker from a Linux box. The Fanimatrix turned out to be a great success. In the first week alone, 70,000 people grabbed a copy of the film. This is quite an achievement, especially when considering that BitTorrent wasn’t as widely known or easy to use back then. With BitTorrent, the film crew easily saved hundreds of thousands of dollars in distribution costs. It was the perfect use case for how the technology could help independent creators. Preserving Internet History Today, there are plenty of free ‘instant streaming’ options available that make BitTorrent look silly. However, it is great to see that the Fanimatrix is still being shared after all these years. It’s part of Internet history now. And with the scheduled to premiere later this year, the project may gain some extra traction as well. fourth installment of The Matrix TorrentFreak spoke to Frost this week who doubled down on his earlier promise to keep the Fanimatrix site and the torrent running for as long as possible. He’s even taken some precautions, in case of an early departure from this world. The original Fanimatrix site went offline for a while, but Frost years ago and plans to keep it online for as long as possible. The crew is also considering a special celebration in two years, when the two-decade mark is passed. restored it

World's Oldest Active Torrent File Can Now Legally Drink in a Few States

El archivo de torrent activo más antiguo del mundo ahora se puede beber legalmente en algunos estados

Le plus ancien fichier de torrent actif au monde peut désormais être consommé légalement dans quelques États

दुनिया की सबसे पुरानी सक्रिय टोरेंट फ़ाइल अब कुछ राज्यों में कानूनी रूप से पी सकती है

世界最古のアクティブなトレント ファイルが、いくつかの州で合法的に飲むことができるようになりました

O arquivo de torrent ativo mais antigo do mundo agora pode beber legalmente em alguns estados

Tệp Torrent hoạt động lâu đời nhất thế giới hiện có thể uống hợp pháp ở một vài quốc gia

世界上最古老的活跃种子文件现在可以在几个州合法饮用

What do Google, Facebook, Youtube, Amazon, Uber and a phone book have in common? They are — searchable lists of stuff. Google is a list of keywords mapped to the websites they appear in. Facebook is a list of profiles, posts, private messages, events and other types of information. Youtube has users, videos and comments. Amazon: merchants and items. Uber: drivers, customers and ride requests. indexes Oh, and the phone book. Young readers might not know that it was a 20th century business model where you print out a database of names matched with phone numbers and drop the heavy object into people’s mailboxes. Most online unicorns are essentially just indexes with a nice user interface and occasionally some sort of customer support. They are commonly called “ ”. platforms Strong network effects are the boon or bane of indexing, depending on whom you ask. Winner takes it all: users must join the most popular index in order to find others and be found, i.e. to get the most search results and appear in as many searches as possible. This is good for the winning company’s shareholders. “Competition is for losers”, as Peter Thiel wrote in his book “From Zero to One”. Also, it’s convenient and computationally efficient when you need to search only one index which contains everything and runs in a highly optimized data center. The downside is that these companies become central points of tremendous power — in other words, . Many of them have become necessities that our daily lives and livelihoods depend upon, yet they are not accountable to their own users. They are private companies that can quite freely favor or discriminate against whomever they like. What is your recourse when Facebook decides to suspend your account for 1 month at a critical time? single points of failure There have been to regulate online platforms akin to banks or electricity companies. Good regulation could help, but bad regulation could make things worse. Many things can go wrong when trying to solve problems by government force. Government too is a monopoly - one that you can’t even unsubscribe from when things go wrong. And how did it work out with bank regulation? It’s always safer if we can develop new technology that solves these problems without the use of force (and more ethical, one could argue). calls as public utilities What Satoshi Nakamoto wrote about banks applies to online platforms as well: “The root problem with conventional currency is all the trust that's required to make it work. The central bank must be trusted not to debase the currency, but the history of fiat currencies is full of breaches of that trust. Banks must be trusted to hold our money and transfer it electronically, but they lend it out in waves of credit bubbles with barely a fraction in reserve. We have to trust them with our privacy, trust them not to let identity thieves drain our accounts.” As we have already seen, such central points will inevitably be abused from the inside or outside for commercial, political or outright criminal gain, while the rest of us pay the price. Historically, printing presses, telegraph offices and railway stations have been some of the first central points seized by communist revolutionaries. Modern day authoritarians hijack search engines and social media corporations. They can be used to direct or suppress public debate and are to influence politics. globally used Some political activists demand “ ” of people they disagree with — too often successfully. Big tech companies themselves have a bias against conservatives, which they have acted upon, banning them more often than left-wing users. deplatforming admittedly arguably In 2018 Germany that obliges social media companies to censor “obviously illegal” user content within 24 hours or face penalties up to 50 million euros. Human Rights Watch the law on the grounds that it “can lead to unaccountable and overbroad censorship” and “sets a dangerous precedent for other governments”. At least Russia, Singapore, and the Philippines have cited the law as a positive example of legislation for removing “illegal” content online. France enacted a in 2019. started enforcing a law criticized similar law A topic of their own are authoritarian countries such as China, Iran, Turkey and North Korea which severely restrict the access to social media or even to the whole internet. People in those countries resort to VPNs, file sharing by or occasionally . usb sticks bluetooth mesh networks For many people, Snowden’s revelations about NSA mass surveillance programs have been the wake-up call to issues. It’s reasonable to ask if we want to share our digital lives with the big tech and subsequently the government. privacy Another concern about centralization is . What if someone at Google just messes up? What if WhatsApp servers are unreachable in an emergency? That concern can be shared regardless of your particular political bias. infrastructure security Decentralize indexing. Take out the middleman. It gets a bit more technical here. How do we make it right? Bitcoin is a proven decentralized alternative to central banks and money transmitters. We no longer have the situation where Alice wants to send money to Bob via middleman Carl, but Dave prevents it by pressuring Carl. Alice doesn’t need anyone’s permission to send her own bitcoins to Bob. Now we just need to make bitcoin more convenient for everyday use and . hodl Bitcoin and other decentralized are all about state management: how to achieve a consensus on the ledger’s balances without asking a central authority. Bitcoin presented a novel solution to the problem: — or more specifically, . Every full bitcoin node replicates a chain of transaction blocks, and the valid version of the chain stamped by the most computing power (proof of work) is considered as the consensus. ledgers blockchain proof of work However, . For example, : you don’t need or want slow and expensive perfect synchronization with everyone in the world. Eventual consistency is sufficient and can be achieved with : systems that don’t even need an internet access — just occasional contact with peers. Examples of such systems are , and . decentralized indexes face a different set of technical challenges and tradeoffs blockchain is not the right tool for social media conflict-free replicated data types Gun Automerge OrbitDB — — CAP theorem: Consistency, Availability and Partition-tolerance choose two. In a decentralized system one of the two must be partition-tolerance network failures do happen. When network failures inevitably happen, you need to choose between availability and consistency of state. In case of a trustless ledger, it may be better to sacrifice availability and stop transactions in order to prevent double-spending. Social networks and many other applications might do fine without strong consistency, i.e. everyone always having the same dataset. The content you post offline can be synchronized later. Even bank ATMs choose A over C, since the benefits outweigh the risks (as explained in this excellent on CAP). article Another challenge is . You don’t want spam in your social media feed. You want search results to actually contain the searched words. When the index is not run by a single trusted entity, you can use a to filter out users and peers that produce spam or other unwanted content - all without giving power to central moderators. how to make sure that the data you receive from peers is relevant or valid web of trust Bittorrent solves this somewhat similarly, exchanging file parts with peers on tit-for-tat basis, rewarding peers for co-operation. You can see your download start slowly and then speed up as other downloading peers see that you are giving back. According to a report by Sandvine, bittorrent traffic accounted for over 50% of upstream broadband traffic in North America in 2011. Sharing of static files in a peer-to-peer network is old and proven technology. However, — big dynamic datasets — . Centralized torrent indexes are the single point of failure that governments, defending billion-dollar corporate interests, have heavy-handedly cracked down upon - most famously and more recently . maintaining and querying decentralized indexes is easier said than done The Pirate Bay KickassTorrents takes torrent indexing in a more decentralized direction. While the index is still centrally maintained, it is distributed via which makes finding its maintainer or preventing its distribution more difficult. The index maintainer could even hide behind Tor to prevent detection by traffic analysis. Torrent Paradise IPFS is a fairly popular IPFS-based project that lets merchants index their own products. , founded in 2006, is a fully decentralized web search application. Both are based on (DHT), the same technology that bittorrent uses for peer finding. OpenBazaar YaCy distributed hash tables is an interesting offline-first mobile application that can synchronize over bluetooth, wifi or remote servers. It is based on the Scuttlebutt feed synchronization system, which already has hundreds of active users. Manyverse I have been working on , . Interface-wise it’s not too different from some existing social media — you can post text, photos, videos, audio or other types of files into your feed. Iris a social networking application that stores everything on its users’ devices and connects to peers directly You can have end-to-end encrypted private chats and get mobile or desktop notifications. Users give each other trust ratings to form a web of trust — a concept that has been used in public key infrastructure since the 90s. Trust ratings are functionally not too different from adding a friend or following someone. Iris browser application . Also available for desktop , mobile and as a library . Iris web of trust works both on the software level and the user level. On the software level it is used to manage peer connections and prioritize storage space: friends connect to each other and replicate each other’s content. On the user level it aims to serve as a that naturally exists in tribes and villages, reducing the need for a and facilitating the . socially scalable version of the system of trust centralized justice system gift economy Web of trust helps filter out spam and other unwanted content without entrusting the power to a central moderator. Instead of a single moderator, you have multiple “moderators” whom you can choose and whose collective decisions you can override. , since your messages are only shown to people whose WoT you are in. It makes trolling, fake news and other propaganda campaigns more difficult Based on (“identity verifications”) from your WoT, such as domain names, email addresses, phone numbers, social media handles or CA certificates. Similarly to or Namecoin, it fulfills all three properties of Zooko’s triangle outlined in . attestations Iris maps natural names to public keys and other identifiers, providing a decentralized alternative to digital identity providers Petnames Names: Decentralized, Secure, Human-Meaningful: Choose Two Unlike Namecoin addresses or other global names, Iris names are not globally unique: there can be multiple people named John Smith. When searching for a name, you get a dropdown list of results ordered by their WoT distance, along with avatars and other human-meaningful attributes that are attested by your WoT. Iris doesn’t have a globally shared state. Instead, what you see depends on what your WoT says. It could be even used to maintain a shared conception of borders, countries and properties. Instead of Google , the borders and names you see on a map would depend on what your WoT has attested to. Good for local sovereignty advocates. Use together with public polls. playing the geopolitical moderator uncensorable Ideally, Iris users would have device-based private keys that share access to the same private data. Losing one key doesn’t matter, and the other keys can be used to invalidate the lost one. If you lose all your keys, you can just ask your WoT to attest a new key to your identity. After enough verifications, other users can fetch the private chats with your old key and re-encrypt them to the new key. Your non-shared private data would be lost though. That could be avoided with yet another key recovery option: , which allows e.g. 3 out of 5 recovery shards stored by friends to restore your private key. Shamir’s Secret Sharing End-to-end encrypted private chat in the Iris mobile app . The strategy is to start with private messaging, since it doesn’t require the same critical mass as public messaging. Iris outsources storage and networking to Gun, the aforementioned CRDT system. With storage adapters it provides offline-first eventually consistent data synchronization between all kinds of storages, such as RAM, file system, local area network peers (multicast), websocket servers or remote WebRTC peers. With a bluetooth adapter you could use it in an ad hoc mesh network where peers don’t even need to be connected all the time - very censorship-resistant. Iris users maintain their of Message and Contact objects. These are synchronized and queried over Gun. When you search for messages or contacts, other indexes in your WoT are also queried. That is . indexes web of trust based decentralized indexing This works using Gun's simple API: # open our own index (read & write permissions)
user = gun.user()
user.auth(keypair)
user.get( ).get(indexKey).put(message)
user.get( , params).on( doSomething(msg))
user.get( )...

# open someone messages 'messages' 'messages' => msg 'contacts' else 's index (read-only)
user = gun.user(publicKey)
user.get(' ', params).on(...) like Google, Amazon, Uber etc. The same paradigm could be used to store and retrieve other kinds of objects and build all kinds of decentralized alternatives to platforms Sharding, replication factor, algorithms for efficient querying of peers and other optimizations are yet to be explored. Perhaps a DHT between trusted peers could be used. The optimal division of labor between local devices and servers (super-peers) needs further research: you want it to work offline or in a mesh network (to some extent), but also to be able to utilize the power of data centers. Servers and efficient data centers have their place even in a system where the data model, storage and networking support decentralization. You could still have companies that maintain large indexes: they would just be interoperable with other actors in the network. The question is how to find the right balance between them. In order to truly compete with centralized platforms, . Iris and the other presented solutions are not quite there yet. Bittorrent does a great job with download speeds, but has no integrated content indexing and search like we’re used to on Netflix, Steam or Spotify. The others typically have performance or scalability issues. On the other hand, we can already boast offline-first capabilities and ease of signup unlike Facebook and the others. Not to mention the sheer ecstatic feeling of self-sovereignty. decentralized applications must provide user experience as good as or even better than what we are used to Iris logo: rainbow colored eye in a speech bubble. If you’re enthusiastic about something that nobody else seems to get, odds are that you are chasing a rainbow (and Iris happens to be the Greek goddess of the rainbow). But sometimes you are right. In 2009 I emailed Satoshi Nakamoto and offered to help however I could with Bitcoin. After that it would take years before bitcoin’s success eventually convinced people to start taking it seriously. I have been similarly enthusiastic about the ideas behind Iris for years, but lacked the marketing skills to promote them. I believe that code speaks louder than words though: bitcoin wouldn’t have gotten off the ground with only the whitepaper and no reference implementation to prove it. Iris software is getting there, but progress is slow when you’re working on a complex system by yourself, using experimental building blocks that have changed many times along the way. If you liked the analysis or the proposed solution, please share this article or check out for more contribution options. If you have a better idea on how to decentralize indexing or otherwise make us less dependent on corporate online platforms, please let us know. The world needs it! Iris on GitHub

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