It’s official: Tron TRX CEO and founder, Justin Sun, buys BitTorrent
BitTorrent is selling for $140M to Justin Sun and his blockchain startup Tron
Report: TRON Cryptocurrency Founder Acquired BitTorrent
There has been some controversy surrounding the acquisition.
The talks have not been all rosy along the way with the proceeding of the agreement hitting a dead end between then and now when Justin sought a restraining order against BitTorrent for looking around for other potential bidders for the acquisition. Their earlier agreement was clear that BitTorrent was not supposed to engage in pursuing other proposals.
Eventually, the courts lifted the restraining order, and Justin formed an authorized entity by the name Rainberry Acquisition LLC. The reason behind the Rainberry name change is because BitTorrent had also changed the name of its operating authorized entity to Rainberry Inc earlier last year.
Then, last week, both Justin’s Rainberry Acquisition Inc and BitTorrent’s Rainberry Inc. quietly agreed and filed both merging documents and status change documents with the office of the California Secretary of State.
Everyone is reporting on this news, but no one is saying what it actually means.
But one shareholder we spoke to says there are two plans. First, it will be used to “legitimise” Tron’s business, which has met with some controversy: it has been accused of plagiarising FileCoin and Ethereum in the development of its technology. And second, as a potential network to help mine coins, using BitTorrent’s P2P architecture and wide network of users.
So this shareholder thinks that Justin Sun spent 140 million dollars to create some kind of POW botnet using the world's most popular peer to peer file sharing application? Seriously... what? In this case, the simplest answer is probably the correct one. Tron's first killer app is going to be fully decentralized and monetized file sharing.
https://coincentral.com/trx-beginners-guide/
Key features of TRON
TRON wants to “Heal the Internet” through the following features:
- Data liberation: free and uncontrolled data
- Enabling content ecosystem where users can obtain digital assets from content spreading
- Personal ICO with the ability to distribute digital assets
- Infrastructure to allow distributed digital assets exchange (such as games) and market forecasting.
Call me crazy, but I think Tron bought THE peer to peer file sharing service because they are going to implement peer to peer file sharing... lol. Now, it's time to imagine how absolutely amazing this is going to be.
This development has me clamoring to buy a few Tron coins. Tron is a powerful platform with nothing built on top of it yet. Even as a blank slate, it still sits at #12 on the market cap. It won't be a blank slate for long. Not only is Tron going to have official support for Java (which is currently the language I'm most comfortable with), they are also focused on gaming and are likely on the verge of introducing the blockchain's first killer app.
P2P file sharing
I'm not sure how many of you out there are familiar with pirating content online, but I used to do it all the time. Any cinema or video game I wanted to experience was mine for the taking. Comcast even gave me five strikes for copyright infringement. It was a three strikes and you're out rule. Comcast likes my business. The strikes were clearly a ruse to appease the holders of intellectual property.
Getting back on track, if you've ever used torrents before you know that everyone in the system downloads the file that they want and is expected to upload that file to others. However, it doesn't always work out this way. Downloading is considered "leeching". Uploading is considered "seeding". If your upload-to-down ratio is less than one you're considered a leech. If it's higher than 1 then you've seeded more than your fair share of the bandwidth.
Many attempts have been made to decentivize leeching and reward seeding, but these attempts have been highly futile. It's mostly just based on the honor system, just like Proof-of-brain.
Enter Tron
Imagine a file sharing platform where leechers have to pay seeders! You now have a system where seeders get paid to seed. This dynamic then creates a balanced ecosystem where everyone is happy. Leechers get to leech for a nominal fee, and seeders get paid to seed. It's a win-win for everyone and will create many 1:1 users who leech just as much as they seed, effectively breaking even. This is how file sharing should operate.
Do you see what this means? Tron is going to create a system where you can mine Tron (or some other token) by being an uploader. I can't even stress enough how amazing this is going to be. It's basically implementing a POW 2.0 concept on top of a POS platform.
To quote myself:
So this shareholder thinks that Justin Sun spent 140 million dollars to create some kind of POW botnet using the world's most popular peer to peer file sharing application?
I guess that guy has a firm understanding of what's going on after all.
Win-Win-Win
You know who else wins? The owners of copyrighted material. Now that the system has been monetized corporations will be able to enter the space and make some money where there was once only "theft". Sure they may continue to run honeypots and get people in trouble for "stealing", but they also might find a better way of mitigating their losses inside the bounds of this new monetized system. The ramifications here are huge. Tron is not only facilitating file sharing, but is also likely going to make it less prone to scrutiny and more legitimate.
Can't be stopped.
How many times has Pirate Bay been shut down? Yet, it's still up and running today. This is a centralized server we are talking about and yet it still can't be shut down by people who cry about IP theft. Now imagine this service on a blockchain. It's completely unstoppable; there are nodes all over the world. Not only that, the service being provided extends far beyond file sharing. API smart contract blockchains are basically worldwide super computers that can do so many things. It would be difficult to justify attacking a full blockchain because of one small thing that it was doing, just like it would be impossible to justify shutting down the internet because illegal activity happens on it.
What about the competition?
This is the best part about the BitTorrent acquisition: Tron has bought out the competition. The competition now works for Tron. This is amazing. Their team is no doubt secretly working on this project in the background. I'm sure they all had to sign NDA non-disclosure agreements. Also, I haven't heard about any other blockchain trying to provide this service. This is a totally open Wild-West market. Sometimes it literally feels like there is virtual gold sitting on the ground just waiting to be picked up.
It's also important to note that Tron is considered competition for Steem. This is a great thing. Tron may help us on our way in The Race To The Bottom. Steem needs a little fire under it to burn out some of the greed. There are still plenty of applications to go around that don't involve file sharing.
Possible Monopoly?
This acquisition puts Tron light-years ahead of the curve when it comes to integrating file sharing on the blockchain. However, as well all know, blockchains are transparent. There is going to be heavy pressure to make everything open source once it goes live. This will allow other blockchains to eventually catch up (if they even want to). It may turn out that no one really wants to compete with Tron's amazing file sharing platform. I doubt it, but who knows. It's very easy to pivot in the cryptosphere because there is so much left to be done. This makes it extremely easy to avoid competition.
Good for everyone
This development is good for everyone in the cryptosphere. What do the naysayers tell us? They say blockchain doesn't do anything. They say crypto appears out of thin air and has no value. Soon™ these people are going to be eating their words because of projects like this one. Get paid to send files to people? Yes please.
Net Neutrality.
Now that net neutrality is dead and dying this should give the opportunity for ISPs to fight back. Just like with Smart Mesh Token and Dent, this is a service that is trying to leech off of the business model of ISPs. We're told that we can use as much bandwidth as we want for a monthly fee. The blockchain is going to exploit this weakness to the fullest. ISPs will be forced to ban these activities or change their business model to charging for bandwidth directly. However, this isn't something we have to worry about until crypto becomes mainstream, and by that time we'll all be millionaires amirite?
Things are looking very good for Tron and the cryptosphere as a whole. These are exciting times.
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