BitCoinTorrentz.com - Torrent Download Service

[mjcmurfy]

So, the longer you seed a torrent, the easier it is to track you down? Like in movies, where they need the bad guy to stay on the phone for at least 30 seconds so they can triangulate his location?

In a manner of speaking, yes, but not exactly. Since the service does not allow the download of illegal or copyrighted materials as explained in the disclaimer on the front page, it should not be a problem, but this is not always possible to enforce due to the anonymity the service affords to it's users.

I have taken some precautions to mitigate these risks, so taking that into consideration, I have decided to allow the seeding of torrents to 1:1 or 3 days, whichever comes first. I have added the following to the FAQ:

Torrent Seeding
This service is not intended for long term seeding or storage of torrents. However, all torrents will upload at full speed throughout the duration of the download, and will continue to seed after the download has been completed until either a ratio of at 1:1 has been achieved or a time limit of 3 days has elapsed.

[helloworld]

Do people seed because it makes them feel warm and fuzzy, or does it somehow help the download rate?

[mjcmurfy]

Do people seed because it makes them feel warm and fuzzy, or does it somehow help the download rate?

It doesn't immediately help your download rate, no. But it does improve the download speed for other people downloading the file. It is more to do with supporting the public bit-torrent community than anything else.

Most people stop public torrents as soon as they have completed, as it makes little sense for them to continue as it only serves to help others while taking on additional risk, and since many (not all) people are intrinsically selfish or have limited bandwidth, they often don't follow the guidelines.

The only reasons I see for doing it are:

1) if you are using a private tracker that requires you to seed to a minimum of 1:1
2) altruism, wanting to improve the health of the torrent for other downloaders
3) your clients and shareholders want you to

[helloworld]

Okay so sorry for one more dumb question, but a "seedbox" is for people who mainly want to upload torrents but don't care much for downloading?

Like, the people who actually rip the DVDs in the first place, for example? Only just heard the term "seedbox" about a week ago and felt old for not instantly knowing what it meant.

I assume you're not seedboxing because it brings to much heat on you by the authorities.

[mjcmurfy]

Okay so sorry for one more dumb question, but a "seedbox" is for people who mainly want to upload torrents but don't care much for downloading?

Correct.

BitCoinTorrentz is intended to be a single-use remote torrent download service to help users who are unable to use the bittorrent protocol due to ISP restrictions, firewalls, or poor download speeds. It is not aimed at those who want to upload large amounts of data in order to achieve better ratios on private trackers. A seed-box is a better alternative is this is what a user wants to do, but requires a monthly subscription that can sometimes be prohibitively expensive for the average user.

Also, users are not afforded any protection or anonymity by seedbox providers. You have to pay typically in USD, requiring a valid credit card and billing address. If anything untoward occurs, the provider will instantly hand out all private information they have on record for the user.

I assume you're not seedboxing because it brings to much heat on you by the authorities.

Correct.

[mjcmurfy]

Would it be hard to set up a seedbox? Would it be much different from the service you already offer?

Yes, and yes.

It would require a much greater level of server resources and expense, as you would have to provide a guaranteed amount of disk space, bandwidth, ram and CPU time for each contract. You would have to set up a recurring billing system and figure out a way of providing remote access to multiple instances of a torrent client via some sort of web fronted or else provide access via a VNC/RDP protocol. You would essentially be providing a limited VPS service.

It is much different, as the user typically has complete control over the client, or sometimes even limited control over the OS itself. Seedboxes are, as the name would suggest, aimed at those who want to seed excessive amounts to private trackers and who have quite a high level of technical knowledge with regards to servers and the bittorrent protocol. Nobody who owns a seedbox would use it to download public torrents for example, where as 100% of the torrents downloaded so far through BitCoinTorrentz are public.

The target market for BitCoinTorrentz is the per-use market, those who are more interested in downloading torrents rather than seeding them and who don't want to pay a regular subscription. It is much easier for a person with limited knowledge of torrents to use my service than it would be for them to purchase, configure and use a seedbox correctly. And it is MUCH cheaper.

There are swathes of providers offering VPS and seedbox services that I wouldn't bother trying to compete with. You wouldn't have a hope of getting even a fraction of the market share without having multiple dedicated servers or a small datacentre of your own. It is expensive to scale, and considering the volatile nature of bitcoin and the much greater fiat costs involved, it would be a very risky business to be involved with.

As far as I am aware, there is no website that offers a simple, straight forward, per-use remote download service in exchange for bitcoin. I have found my niche, and I think I will stick with it.

[molecular]

Would it be hard to set up a seedbox? Would it be much different from the service you already offer?

That's a comepletely different story. Totally different.

[mjcmurfy]

That's a comepletely different story. Totally different.

I see you have changed your sig, I guess the affiliate program wasn't working out for you. There has been some limited referral activity though, about 10 referral downloads out of a total of 289. I have never operated a referral program in my life, so I have no idea how this stacks up to others. Don't suppose you have any suggestions on how it might be improved?

[molecular]

That's a comepletely different story. Totally different.

I see you have changed your sig, I guess the affiliate program wasn't working out for you. There has been some limited referral activity though, about 10 referral downloads out of a total of 289. I have never operated a referral program in my life, so I have no idea how this stacks up to others. Don't suppose you have any suggestions on how it might be improved?

I changed it because the guy who runs coinabul is someone I grew to like (I talk to him regularly) and he asked that favour, combined with the fact the the sig-space is only 300 chars and it wouldn't fit both ads without using url shortener, which I didn't want to do. I asked him not to be sad when I switch back to bitcointorrentz

I didn't put the ad there originally for the referrer money. I doubted from the beginning people would use it much. I myself often remove referrer info from ads before going to the page (or just enter the page's url manually). I don't exactly know why...

Here's my referrer stats for everyones info:

Referral Key:    sdepe
Referral Downloads:    3
Total Hits:    171
Total Earnings:    0.017

Earnings Statistics
Earnings per Hit:   9.9E-5 btc
Conversion rate:   1.75 %

I will put the bitcointorrentz ad back in a couple of days. Probably without my referrer info... it just leaves a bad taste somehow.

EDIT: Using this logic, I should probably also remove the coinabul referral info. However, if someone actually uses that to buy an ounce of gold there, that'd be considerable revenue for me

[molecular]

Just thought I'd drop this in here since we have been thinking about how to market:

"Selling Advertising to 200,000 + US college Students": https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=48560.msg577703#msg577703

It's probably way out of our financial possibilities, but it'd be a large part of our possible target group, right: "college students behind bittorrent-filters"?

I'm not advocating this, I think we're growing just fine as it is, but maybe it's fun to discuss the idea...

[dancupid]

I just downloaded a torrent and received the message "The file you are looking for has expired or does not exist!" - this was after a couple for hours of checking back after I started the download. Not Sure what happened and it was quite a small file (200MB or so), so I'm not worried about the money, but you may want to check what happened.

[mjcmurfy]

I just downloaded a torrent and received the message "The file you are looking for has expired or does not exist!" - this was after a couple for hours of checking back after I started the download. Not Sure what happened and it was quite a small file (200MB or so), so I'm not worried about the money, but you may want to check what happened.

Hmm, strange. Sorry about that. PM me the link to the torrent you are referring to and I will check it out.

@molecular: Yeah, you are right. That is the exact demographic we are targeting. I saw that thread when it came out, it certainly piqued my interest. But it is considerably more expensive than this service could afford right now. I wonder if a smaller deal could be worked out? I might PM the guy. It's certainly worth keeping in mind for the future at least.

[molecular]

@molecular: Yeah, you are right. That is the exact demographic we are targeting. I saw that thread when it came out, it certainly piqued my interest. But it is considerably more expensive than this service could afford right now. I wonder if a smaller deal could be worked out? I might PM the guy. It's certainly worth keeping in mind for the future at least.

It might be worth a try to check out the return using a smaller deal (like 1 college or something). That way we we could judge how well the service is received and calculate wether it might be applicable to raise more money (count on me for a chunk ) by issuing more shares and going larger-scale.

Maybe they'd be interested in giving us a good deal in order to eventually sell a bigger one. Can't hurt to ask, I'd say.

[2weiX]

@molecular: Yeah, you are right. That is the exact demographic we are targeting. I saw that thread when it came out, it certainly piqued my interest. But it is considerably more expensive than this service could afford right now. I wonder if a smaller deal could be worked out? I might PM the guy. It's certainly worth keeping in mind for the future at least.

It might be worth a try to check out the return using a smaller deal (like 1 college or something). That way we we could judge how well the service is received and calculate wether it might be applicable to raise more money (count on me for a chunk ) by issuing more shares and going larger-scale.

#2
chunk-ish^^

[bitfoo]

Server down? I'm craving me some torrentz!

[mjcmurfy]

My apologies about this. The server is down because of unscheduled maintenance due to a fault at the hosting company's datacentre. They have not given any timeframe for how long this maintenance is going to take. Hopefully it shouldn't take more than a couple of hours, but it's after working hours there now so it could be tomorrow before it is sorted out.

Once again, please accept my apologies for this inconvenience.
I will update this thread as soon as the fault has been fixed and the site is back online.

[mjcmurfy]

The server is now back online.

[TTBit]

nice service.

I would prefer to buy a block of GB, rather than send for each download.

also, a better way of downloading more than 1 file at a time. You cant have one tab download file 'A', while another tab downloads file 'B'. Each tab gives status of 'B'.

[mjcmurfy]

nice service.

I would prefer to buy a block of GB, rather than send for each download.

also, a better way of downloading more than 1 file at a time. You cant have one tab download file 'A', while another tab downloads file 'B'. Each tab gives status of 'B'.

Thanks for trying out the service. I am glad you find it useful. I am aware of the bug you mentioned about downloading multiple files (see a few posts above) and should have a fix sorted out by next week.

I'm also working on better payment methods to reduce transaction fees and I really like your idea about buying bundled bandwidth credit. I might consider this for the next update. Thanks for the suggestion!

[dancupid]

nice service.

I would prefer to buy a block of GB, rather than send for each download.

also, a better way of downloading more than 1 file at a time. You cant have one tab download file 'A', while another tab downloads file 'B'. Each tab gives status of 'B'.

Thanks for trying out the service. I am glad you find it useful. I am aware of the bug you mentioned about downloading multiple files (see a few posts above) and should have a fix sorted out by next week.

I'm also working on better payment methods to reduce transaction fees and I really like your idea about buying bundled bandwidth credit. I might consider this for the next update. Thanks for the suggestion!

I'd like to be able to just send you a couple of bitcoins, and then wait for it to be used up and then top it up as and when- though you may end up with people using you as a wallet service, or just somewhere to store their bitcoins, which may impact on your security concerns - if you are storing lots of bitcoins in user accounts then perhaps you would become attractive for hackers to attack. As it is now there is nothing to attract any sort of attack.
But it's certainly an addition I'd be interested in if you could show you were secure.