Bitcoin Forum
March 28, 2024, 10:49:13 AM *
News: Latest Bitcoin Core release: 26.0 [Torrent]
 
   Home   Help Search Login Register More  
Pages: « 1 2 3 4 [5] 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 »
  Print  
Author Topic: BitCoinTorrentz.com - Torrent Download Service  (Read 57142 times)
Bitcoin Swami
Full Member
***
Offline Offline

Activity: 182
Merit: 100


View Profile
September 17, 2011, 04:47:37 PM
 #81

Posted about your site on my trading info site.

http://btcstocktrader.com/
1711622953
Hero Member
*
Offline Offline

Posts: 1711622953

View Profile Personal Message (Offline)

Ignore
1711622953
Reply with quote  #2

1711622953
Report to moderator
"If you don't want people to know you're a scumbag then don't be a scumbag." -- margaritahuyan
Advertised sites are not endorsed by the Bitcoin Forum. They may be unsafe, untrustworthy, or illegal in your jurisdiction.
1711622953
Hero Member
*
Offline Offline

Posts: 1711622953

View Profile Personal Message (Offline)

Ignore
1711622953
Reply with quote  #2

1711622953
Report to moderator
1711622953
Hero Member
*
Offline Offline

Posts: 1711622953

View Profile Personal Message (Offline)

Ignore
1711622953
Reply with quote  #2

1711622953
Report to moderator
mjcmurfy (OP)
Sr. Member
****
Offline Offline

Activity: 336
Merit: 250



View Profile WWW
September 17, 2011, 10:39:23 PM
 #82

So what's the benefit of using this service over just paying for Usenet?

I do like the idea as far as it getting people to spend bitcoins, but I suppose if you've ever used Usenet, you'd never look back Cheesy  That said, there are a lot of people out there who aren't savvy enough to move to usenet (or who truly don't want to pay for it, but then those people are out of your target market as well) and are stuck in the old torrent ways, so I suppose you're after those types.

Usenet is one of the oldest network systems in use. The protocol has been around since the 70's. It was probably one of the first decentralized systems, and paved the road towards the development of the bit torrent protocol. It was never designed for the purposes of filesharing, it was a communications network. Bulletin boards and email superseded it for that purpose, just like protocols like bittorrent have superseded its filesharing use.

Today, usenet is outmoded and antiquated for the purposes of p2p sharing. It's not useless, not by any means, but you have to pay subscription fees, then learn its many idiosyncrasies and use command-line instructions. It's not for everyone, and has primarily a devout cult following. It's not well understood, and to be honest, there are better alternatives available now. Also, I could be wrong, but I believe many ISP's actually block usenet traffic from their networks. Please correct me if I am mistaken there.

But anyway, there is nothing you can get on usenet that is not available on torrent trackers.

Posted about your site on my trading info site.

http://btcstocktrader.com/

Awesome!! Thanks for taking the time to do that. The more publicity bitcointorrentz can get, the better! Just one point of note however, I will issue dividends every two months, not monthly, as stated in your writeup. I did state initially that it would be a monthly payment, but I subsequently decided that a bi-monthly payment structure would be better and edited my post above to reflect this. Sorry for the confusion.

My current list of to-do items:
1. Create a unique wallet address based payment system
2. Improve the banners and the referral control panel.
3. Implement support for magnet links (as suggested by HostFat)
4. Add a news/blog page (also suggested by HostFat)
5. Link the pricing structure of the service to a moving average of the btc:usd rate

Any other suggestions?

http://www.bitcointorrentz.com/images/bct_button_117_30.png - BitCoinTorrentz.com: High-speed HTTP torrent downloads. 0.05 btc/gb. Up to 50% discount with free membership!
molecular
Donator
Legendary
*
Offline Offline

Activity: 2772
Merit: 1019



View Profile
September 17, 2011, 11:51:51 PM
 #83

My current list of to-do items:
1. Create a unique wallet address based payment system
2. Improve the banners and the referral control panel.
3. Implement support for magnet links (as suggested by HostFat)
4. Add a news/blog page (also suggested by HostFat)
5. Link the pricing structure of the service to a moving average of the btc:usd rate

Any other suggestions?

I'm a happy shareholder. I know the shares come with no vote and everything is up to you (and I trust you, otherwise I wouldn't have bought the shares)
Let me ask some questions, however, that might trigger some discussion:

  • Are you going to publish some numbers, like number of downloads, revenue from downloads, hits through referrall program, hits without referrer, conversion rate, etc...? If so, will you do so regularly and when?
  • Are you open to discuss the pricing? I would opt for a lower price, at least at the beginning. My referral stats page says I brought 38 hits that converted to 0 downloads... maybe the price is too high, maybe it'll just need time to "incubate", but back when I was "only" a user, I thought the price was a bit high, and I really had to be in the situation to "be looking for exactly that service" in order to use it. Maybe this is a situation where more money can be earned at a lower price-point, at least until the server capacity is reached?

You seem really motivated and productive, keep it up Wink

PGP key molecular F9B70769 fingerprint 9CDD C0D3 20F8 279F 6BE0  3F39 FC49 2362 F9B7 0769
mjcmurfy (OP)
Sr. Member
****
Offline Offline

Activity: 336
Merit: 250



View Profile WWW
September 18, 2011, 12:45:08 AM
 #84

The shares do come with a vote, as stated in the contract, but since I only released 20% of them so far, I still maintain executive control. I am however 100% open to any and all suggestions, from both shareholders and the community at large. I greatly value any input received, and this thread alone has already helped me make several excellent modifications to the site.

With regards to your questions. Yes, I do intend to fully publish numbers. But I am not sure where the best place to do this would be. Here in this thread? On the website itself? Through a transparent stats page open to the public or perhaps only open to shareholders? In a group email to shareholders? I am not sure.

The service has been operational for a bit over a week now, and has generated 2.6961 btc in earnings. My prediction for the first 3 weeks was only 2.1 btc, so we are already exceeding the targets outlined in my business plan by almost 400%.

When I get the news section up and running, I will most likely use that for earnings reports etc. On my to-do list also is the improvement of the referral control panel, to give you details like conversion rate, earnings per click, etc.

And yes, I am completely willing to discuss the pricing. I know what you mean about visitors having to be in the right mood at the right time. I do feel that the price is probably a little high, and bandwidth is easy to come by while bitcoins are not. So to give incentive to use the service, I have a few ideas that I'm juggling around in my head:

  • Start a promotional offer that gives users 50% off downloads under 1gb. This would run for a couple of weeks until a solid user base has been built up.
  • Change the price structure from a static 0.1btc/gb to a sliding scale, reducing the cost for larger torrents.
  • Link the price to a weighted average of btc:usd value, as described above.
  • Give affiliates the ability to issue promotional codes that entitle the user to 1 free download, or else randomly issue them to visitors of the site, which would encourage return traffic

What do you think?

http://www.bitcointorrentz.com/images/bct_button_117_30.png - BitCoinTorrentz.com: High-speed HTTP torrent downloads. 0.05 btc/gb. Up to 50% discount with free membership!
terrytibbs
Hero Member
*****
Offline Offline

Activity: 560
Merit: 501



View Profile
September 18, 2011, 12:53:52 AM
 #85

Love the constant bouncing back of ideas and questions between developer and user/shareholder in this thread. Keep it up guys!
Bitcoin Swami
Full Member
***
Offline Offline

Activity: 182
Merit: 100


View Profile
September 18, 2011, 02:33:57 AM
 #86

The shares do come with a vote, as stated in the contract, but since I only released 20% of them so far, I still maintain executive control. I am however 100% open to any and all suggestions, from both shareholders and the community at large. I greatly value any input received, and this thread alone has already helped me make several excellent modifications to the site.

With regards to your questions. Yes, I do intend to fully publish numbers. But I am not sure where the best place to do this would be. Here in this thread? On the website itself? Through a transparent stats page open to the public or perhaps only open to shareholders? In a group email to shareholders? I am not sure.

The service has been operational for a bit over a week now, and has generated 2.6961 btc in earnings. My prediction for the first 3 weeks was only 2.1 btc, so we are already exceeding the targets outlined in my business plan by almost 400%.

When I get the news section up and running, I will most likely use that for earnings reports etc. On my to-do list also is the improvement of the referral control panel, to give you details like conversion rate, earnings per click, etc.

And yes, I am completely willing to discuss the pricing. I know what you mean about visitors having to be in the right mood at the right time. I do feel that the price is probably a little high, and bandwidth is easy to come by while bitcoins are not. So to give incentive to use the service, I have a few ideas that I'm juggling around in my head:

  • Start a promotional offer that gives users 50% off downloads under 1gb. This would run for a couple of weeks until a solid user base has been built up.
  • Change the price structure from a static 0.1btc/gb to a sliding scale, reducing the cost for larger torrents.
  • Link the price to a weighted average of btc:usd value, as described above.
  • Give affiliates the ability to issue promotional codes that entitle the user to 1 free download, or else randomly issue them to visitors of the site, which would encourage return traffic

What do you think?

Ok I'll change that, sorry. 

As far as keeping your shareholders up to date, you can make a google spreadsheet like I did and shareholders can check in on everything with a link.  It keeps my brain straight and everyone elses.  Here is mine. I update every day, but I'm sure you can update whenever you want.

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AvdHbho4OHt9dFVTVHFUNFVvNFZyc2E5eERPeFd2Y1E&hl=en_US#gid=0
mjcmurfy (OP)
Sr. Member
****
Offline Offline

Activity: 336
Merit: 250



View Profile WWW
September 18, 2011, 03:33:47 AM
 #87

Ok I'll change that, sorry.  

As far as keeping your shareholders up to date, you can make a google spreadsheet like I did and shareholders can check in on everything with a link.  It keeps my brain straight and everyone elses.  Here is mine. I update every day, but I'm sure you can update whenever you want.

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AvdHbho4OHt9dFVTVHFUNFVvNFZyc2E5eERPeFd2Y1E&hl=en_US#gid=0

It's so weird you suggested that.

I was having a look at smokey mountain mining and saw the link to your finances spreadsheet at the top. I thought it would be a good idea to do something similar for my site. Then you suggested it, literally about an hour later.

I love the transparency of it, and your info/comments are so detailed. I especially like the comment on row 25! Smiley
You clearly run a tight ship! Fantastic work.

You update that spreadsheet daily? That seems like a lot of effort. I would prefer to have a financial statistics page integrated into my site directly so that I could automate a lot of the work of adding entries that way, without having to manually edit it every day. I might follow a similar format to yours, but do it via html/php and mysql queries instead.

Interesting...

http://www.bitcointorrentz.com/images/bct_button_117_30.png - BitCoinTorrentz.com: High-speed HTTP torrent downloads. 0.05 btc/gb. Up to 50% discount with free membership!
Bitcoin Swami
Full Member
***
Offline Offline

Activity: 182
Merit: 100


View Profile
September 18, 2011, 03:47:08 AM
 #88

Ok I'll change that, sorry.  

As far as keeping your shareholders up to date, you can make a google spreadsheet like I did and shareholders can check in on everything with a link.  It keeps my brain straight and everyone elses.  Here is mine. I update every day, but I'm sure you can update whenever you want.

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AvdHbho4OHt9dFVTVHFUNFVvNFZyc2E5eERPeFd2Y1E&hl=en_US#gid=0

It's so weird you suggested that.

I was having a look at smokey mountain mining and saw the link to your finances spreadsheet at the top. I thought it would be a good idea to do something similar for my site. Then you suggested it, literally about an hour later.

I love the transparency of it, and your info/comments are so detailed. I especially like the comment on row 25! Smiley
You clearly run a tight ship! Fantastic work.

You update that spreadsheet daily? That seems like a lot of effort. I would prefer to have a financial statistics page integrated into my site directly so that I could automate a lot of the work of adding entries that way, without having to manually edit it every day. I might follow a similar format to yours, but do it via html/php and mysql queries instead.

Interesting...

the only reason i update daily is because I pay out daily. Smiley
Ben Walsh (beamer)
Sr. Member
****
Offline Offline

Activity: 343
Merit: 250



View Profile
September 18, 2011, 09:21:42 AM
 #89

For me, the frequent and informative communication through that spreadsheet was a key reason for my initial and subsequent investment,

As a mining company I think the effort of daily communication and div payout is necessary.

Once this company is sufficiently developed I would be happy with say five times the content every two weeks.

 What are other investors thoughts on this?


 
Ok I'll change that, sorry.  

As far as keeping your shareholders up to date, you can make a google spreadsheet like I did and shareholders can check in on everything with a link.  It keeps my brain straight and everyone elses.  Here is mine. I update every day, but I'm sure you can update whenever you want.
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AvdHbho4OHt9dFVTVHFUNFVvNFZyc2E5eERPeFd2Y1E&hl=en_US#gid=0
?

It's so weird you suggested that.

I was having a look at smokey mountain mining and saw the link to your finances spreadsheet at the top. I thought it would be a good idea to do something similar for my site. Then you suggested it, literally about an hour later.

I love the transparency of it, and your info/comments are so detailed. I especially like the comment on row 25! Smiley
You clearly run a tight ship! Fantastic work.

You update that spreadsheet daily? That seems like a lot of effort. I would prefer to have a financial statistics page integrated into my site directly so that I could automate a lot of the work of adding entries that way, without having to manually edit it every day. I might follow a similar format to yours, but do it via html/php and mysql queries instead.

Interesting...

the only reason i update daily is because I pay out daily. Smiley
molecular
Donator
Legendary
*
Offline Offline

Activity: 2772
Merit: 1019



View Profile
September 18, 2011, 01:09:25 PM
 #90

The shares do come with a vote, as stated in the contract, but since I only released 20% of them so far, I still maintain executive control. I am however 100% open to any and all suggestions, from both shareholders and the community at large. I greatly value any input received, and this thread alone has already helped me make several excellent modifications to the site.

Nice! Are you planning to sell more of your 800 shares any time soon? The demand seems to be high, price already went up to 0.3BTC/share.

With regards to your questions. Yes, I do intend to fully publish numbers. But I am not sure where the best place to do this would be. Here in this thread? On the website itself? Through a transparent stats page open to the public or perhaps only open to shareholders? In a group email to shareholders? I am not sure.

The service has been operational for a bit over a week now, and has generated 2.6961 btc in earnings. My prediction for the first 3 weeks was only 2.1 btc, so we are already exceeding the targets outlined in my business plan by almost 400%.

Awesome, I assumed you would be transparent about the business numbers. Nice to see this in writing. It's nice to know there actually are quite a few downloads.

When I get the news section up and running, I will most likely use that for earnings reports etc. On my to-do list also is the improvement of the referral control panel, to give you details like conversion rate, earnings per click, etc.

And yes, I am completely willing to discuss the pricing. I know what you mean about visitors having to be in the right mood at the right time. I do feel that the price is probably a little high, and bandwidth is easy to come by while bitcoins are not. So to give incentive to use the service, I have a few ideas that I'm juggling around in my head:

  • Start a promotional offer that gives users 50% off downloads under 1gb. This would run for a couple of weeks until a solid user base has been built up.
  • Change the price structure from a static 0.1btc/gb to a sliding scale, reducing the cost for larger torrents.
  • Link the price to a weighted average of btc:usd value, as described above.
  • Give affiliates the ability to issue promotional codes that entitle the user to 1 free download, or else randomly issue them to visitors of the site, which would encourage return traffic

What do you think?

I'm not sure about wether I would like to see the business numbers and investor info stuff on the site itself. I really like the idea of a google spreadsheet. There's also editgrid and others if google scares you.

A shareholder mailinglist also seems a good idea. I'm not sure wether or not I would try to keep things secret from non-shareholders. Probably not worth the hassle, why not let users/interested people see the numbers, too.

I also like your promotional ideas. I think it's important to build a solid userbase, which is a no-brainer, actually.

A "sliding scale" might be a good idea, but why not make it simpler to understand for users by making it a fixed fee per download plus a (lower than now) fee per GByte?


PGP key molecular F9B70769 fingerprint 9CDD C0D3 20F8 279F 6BE0  3F39 FC49 2362 F9B7 0769
mjcmurfy (OP)
Sr. Member
****
Offline Offline

Activity: 336
Merit: 250



View Profile WWW
September 18, 2011, 09:43:22 PM
 #91

Ok, I have halved the current fee to 0.05 btc / GB. That extra 0 after the decimal point should indeed attract a more significant amount of interest. At this price level, I think there is huge potential for organic growth of the service, at which time a more structured pricing plan would be introduced.

I have also changed around the prose and layout of the main landing page, as this is where the sale is won or lost. I would appreciate any input into the wording of the "sales pitch", or the general layout of the text, on the homepage.

Also, the share price of BitCoinTorrentz on GLBSE has risen by 250% since my IPO!!!
I'm flabbergasted...

http://www.bitcointorrentz.com/images/bct_button_117_30.png - BitCoinTorrentz.com: High-speed HTTP torrent downloads. 0.05 btc/gb. Up to 50% discount with free membership!
molecular
Donator
Legendary
*
Offline Offline

Activity: 2772
Merit: 1019



View Profile
September 18, 2011, 10:11:30 PM
 #92

Ok, I have halved the current fee to 0.05 btc / GB. That extra 0 after the decimal point should indeed attract a more significant amount of interest. At this price level, I think there is huge potential for organic growth of the service, at which time a more structured pricing plan would be introduced.

I have also changed around the prose and layout of the main landing page, as this is where the sale is won or lost. I would appreciate any input into the wording of the "sales pitch", or the general layout of the text, on the homepage.

Also, the share price of BitCoinTorrentz on GLBSE has risen by 250% since my IPO!!!
I'm flabbergasted...

First off, let me express my amazement at this project/company and how you handle things (well, quickly and in an open way, that is). I also love that my input as a user and shareholder is taken seriously. It's been some time since I had this much fun and excitement watching and participating in something in the bitcoin world. Very refreshing!

Ok, enough of crawling up peoples butts and on to some comments:

1.) I think halving the fee for now is the right decision. Thanks for considering the idea of lowering price and going for it. I hope it'll work out as intended (bigger userbase)

2.) I went through the torrent upload/download/payment process again 2 times. It was really enjoyable and fluent. Payment accept was quick, however, as you clearly state it can sometimes take longer (I'm assuming in case your node misses the transaction for some reason and has to wait for a block with the tx in it), and in that case I'm looking at a squiggly thing and some text saying "waiting for payment", which is allright. What I would love to see here in addition is the payment address, because: should the payment take longer, I might decide to check wether or not I sent the money to the right address, which as of now, I can't. Next up: the download progress page. It's very cool, thanks for implementing that (figuring out how to pull the info from your torrent client or whatever you had to do for that), I've really missed progress info the first time around. A little ugly: the fact that the complete page is reloaded. Some ajax would be cool, but that's not high priority at all, it's totally acceptable as it is.

3.) I read through your sales pitch and one thing that got me thinking: you say the service is 100% anonymous. Now, when I did the last download, I figured I might as well try to screw you over (sorry for that) and try to get the 20% referral bonus for my own download (I didn't do this because I needed 0.006 BTC desperately, but because I was trying to figure out how you would identify me as either "having visited before without referrer" or "being the referrer himself"). So I deleted all www.bittorrentz.com and bittorrentz.com cookies. The downloads did not get credited to my referrer account (which is correct, of course). So, how do you do it then? You can't be using my ip-address, right, since the service is 100% anonymous, so you don't record ip addresses. Note that I'm not really complaining here, but this is something we might get attacked on by users and it's better to clear this up now, right? Maybe it would also be good to be more specific about this issue on the site, saying that you don't keep logs (only if that's the case, of course), that you securely delete the .torrent files, etc... maybe an FAQ entry "What measures are taken to ensure my privacy?"

On a personal note: I'll be on vacation starting tomorrow for three weeks. Sadly therefore, I won't be able to participate here, at least not as much as I'd probably like to. So keep up the great work, (not just mjcmurfy, but all of you) and have fun doing it.

PGP key molecular F9B70769 fingerprint 9CDD C0D3 20F8 279F 6BE0  3F39 FC49 2362 F9B7 0769
terrytibbs
Hero Member
*****
Offline Offline

Activity: 560
Merit: 501



View Profile
September 18, 2011, 10:31:34 PM
 #93

Ok, I have halved the current fee to 0.05 btc / GB. That extra 0 after the decimal point should indeed attract a more significant amount of interest. At this price level, I think there is huge potential for organic growth of the service, at which time a more structured pricing plan would be introduced.

I have also changed around the prose and layout of the main landing page, as this is where the sale is won or lost. I would appreciate any input into the wording of the "sales pitch", or the general layout of the text, on the homepage.

Also, the share price of BitCoinTorrentz on GLBSE has risen by 250% since my IPO!!!
I'm flabbergasted...

First off, let me express my amazement at this project/company and how you handle things (well, quickly and in an open way, that is). I also love that my input as a user and shareholder is taken seriously. It's been some time since I had this much fun and excitement watching and participating in something in the bitcoin world. Very refreshing!

Ok, enough of crawling up peoples butts and on to some comments:

1.) I think halving the fee for now is the right decision. Thanks for considering the idea of lowering price and going for it. I hope it'll work out as intended (bigger userbase)

2.) I went through the torrent upload/download/payment process again 2 times. It was really enjoyable and fluent. Payment accept was quick, however, as you clearly state it can sometimes take longer (I'm assuming in case your node misses the transaction for some reason and has to wait for a block with the tx in it), and in that case I'm looking at a squiggly thing and some text saying "waiting for payment", which is allright. What I would love to see here in addition is the payment address, because: should the payment take longer, I might decide to check wether or not I sent the money to the right address, which as of now, I can't. Next up: the download progress page. It's very cool, thanks for implementing that (figuring out how to pull the info from your torrent client or whatever you had to do for that), I've really missed progress info the first time around. A little ugly: the fact that the complete page is reloaded. Some ajax would be cool, but that's not high priority at all, it's totally acceptable as it is.

3.) I read through your sales pitch and one thing that got me thinking: you say the service is 100% anonymous. Now, when I did the last download, I figured I might as well try to screw you over (sorry for that) and try to get the 20% referral bonus for my own download (I didn't do this because I needed 0.006 BTC desperately, but because I was trying to figure out how you would identify me as either "having visited before without referrer" or "being the referrer himself"). So I deleted all www.bittorrentz.com and bittorrentz.com cookies. The downloads did not get credited to my referrer account (which is correct, of course). So, how do you do it then? You can't be using my ip-address, right, since the service is 100% anonymous, so you don't record ip addresses. Note that I'm not really complaining here, but this is something we might get attacked on by users and it's better to clear this up now, right? Maybe it would also be good to be more specific about this issue on the site, saying that you don't keep logs (only if that's the case, of course), that you securely delete the .torrent files, etc... maybe an FAQ entry "What measures are taken to ensure my privacy?"

On a personal note: I'll be on vacation starting tomorrow for three weeks. Sadly therefore, I won't be able to participate here, at least not as much as I'd probably like to. So keep up the great work, (not just mjcmurfy, but all of you) and have fun doing it.


All valid points. Oh! You might want to update the price in that signature of yours before you head off!
mjcmurfy (OP)
Sr. Member
****
Offline Offline

Activity: 336
Merit: 250



View Profile WWW
September 18, 2011, 10:35:51 PM
Last edit: September 18, 2011, 10:50:55 PM by mjcmurfy
 #94

@molecular:

I totally agree with you that a complete page refresh is clumsy, and I intend to transition to an ajax-based update of the status page in the future. I am not that fluent in ajax, so I decided to go what what I know, which is a javascript refresh. Once I become a little more familiar with ajax, it will not be a problem to implement. I just wanted to get the new and improved status page up and running a.s.a.p.

I like your suggestion about including the payment address on the waiting for payment page. I will implement this in my next site update with some other improvements.

With regards to your questions regarding IP anonymity, I answered this question earlier in the thread:

Since use of the service is anonymous, it seems like there's nothing that prevents a user from simply using his/her own referral link to get a permanent 20% rebate on the service, instead of crediting the 20% to someone else.

I have already reflected on this. I considered just allowing this exception to occur, because to be honest, as long as people are using the service, I don't really mind if they do it by getting a 20% rebate each time. It's still revenue at the end of the day, and it still leaves 80% for me. It makes sense to have a smaller share of a big pie, than a big share of a smaller pie.

But in saying that, I have actually implemented methods to prevent it.
It is stated in the referral control panel that using your own referral link will not gain you any credits.

The service is 100% anonymous for end-users, but to ensure that the scenario you have alluded to does not occur, the IP address of those who sign up for referral accounts is recorded and checked against if they try to use their own referral link. I do not see the problem with this considering they also have to provide their email address.

Referrers are not breaking the law by pointing people to a website for legitimate use.
They are not responsible for how the service is used by third parties.
So they need not worry about their IP or email address being stored.

It remains that no IP information, or any other means of identification, is recorded for those who download torrents.
Even if a referrer downloads a torrent, they cannot be linked to the download, and can therefore be assured of privacy.

I may transition to a cookie-based method of identifying this type of behavior in the future however to ameliorate the need to record the IP address of those who sign up for referral accounts.

So essentially, the IP addresses of affiliates IS recorded. And a check is run against the affiliates table to check if the affiliate is trying to use his own IP address. The actual IP address of the USER is not recorded, just instantaneously checked against the IP of affiliate who referred them to the site. It is not stored, just read at runtime by the server. I didn't consider this to be a problem (i.e. the storing of affiliate IP addresses) since they have to provide an email address anyway. And as I stated in my above post, affiliates are not breaking the law by pointing people to a website for legitimate use, nor are they responsible for how the service is used by third parties.

Affiliates can use the service and be assured that they can not be identified as doing so. If you wish, I can provide you with access to the PHP code molecular so you can verify that this is the case. As I said above, I might transition to a cookie based system of identification of affiliates, but then there is nothing to stop them from just deleting their cache and getting a 20% rebate.

Actually, you know what, I think affiliates are probably ENTITLED to a 20% rebate. Do you think I should just get rid of this and allow affiliates to avail of a permanent rebate?

By the way, if you want to try and screw me over, use your referral key to download a file from an IP address other than that which you used to register as an affiliate. This way you can also test that the affiliate system itself is working, which is what I suspect you were also trying to do.

With regards to secure deletion of files, they are deleted using a 7-pass overwrite of the data.
I will include all of this in the FAQ as per your suggestion.

http://www.bitcointorrentz.com/images/bct_button_117_30.png - BitCoinTorrentz.com: High-speed HTTP torrent downloads. 0.05 btc/gb. Up to 50% discount with free membership!
bitfoo
Donator
Sr. Member
*
Offline Offline

Activity: 289
Merit: 250



View Profile
September 18, 2011, 10:49:34 PM
 #95

I did a new bandwidth test, from a 100 Mbps west coast USA link.

Single connection: 400KB/s (same as before)
30 parallel connections: 8MB/s.

It almost saturates my incoming bandwidth, I'm happy! Does the high number of connections put too much load on your server?

mjcmurfy (OP)
Sr. Member
****
Offline Offline

Activity: 336
Merit: 250



View Profile WWW
September 18, 2011, 10:58:39 PM
 #96

I did a new bandwidth test, from a 100 Mbps west coast USA link.

Single connection: 400KB/s (same as before)
30 parallel connections: 8MB/s.

It almost saturates my incoming bandwidth, I'm happy! Does the high number of connections put too much load on your server?

This server is not used for any other resource intensive purposes. It does host a few low traffic websites, so users are completely free to utilize the full capability of their connection using as many concurrent connections as they like.

Also, your max speed was actually over 9mb/s at one point according to a peak that I can see on my server bandwidth monitor! Smiley
It made me very happy to see that someone was getting almost a full 100mbit download speed.
It might not have been all been going to you though.

http://www.bitcointorrentz.com/images/bct_button_117_30.png - BitCoinTorrentz.com: High-speed HTTP torrent downloads. 0.05 btc/gb. Up to 50% discount with free membership!
molecular
Donator
Legendary
*
Offline Offline

Activity: 2772
Merit: 1019



View Profile
September 18, 2011, 11:30:48 PM
 #97

Actually, you know what, I think affiliates are probably ENTITLED to a 20% rebate. Do you think I should just get rid of this and allow affiliates to avail of a permanent rebate?

By the way, if you want to try and screw me over, use your referral key to download a file from an IP address other than that which you used to register as an affiliate. This way you can also test that the affiliate system itself is working, which is what I suspect you were also trying to do.

I don't have time to react to all your answers, but the answer is "cool" or "awesome" to most of them anyways Wink

I remember reading your explanation regarding IP-address storage now. This is good enough for me.

About making all affiliates ENTITLED to 20% discount: well, it's pretty easy to become an affiliate, right? But why not? You'll adjust the price at some point anyhow, this will just be reflected in the price calculation, then, so I see no problem with that.

Ok, off to bed and on to plane tomorrow... cu guys.

PGP key molecular F9B70769 fingerprint 9CDD C0D3 20F8 279F 6BE0  3F39 FC49 2362 F9B7 0769
mjcmurfy (OP)
Sr. Member
****
Offline Offline

Activity: 336
Merit: 250



View Profile WWW
September 18, 2011, 11:40:53 PM
 #98

I don't have time to react to all your answers, but the answer is "cool" or "awesome" to most of them anyways Wink

I remember reading your explanation regarding IP-address storage now. This is good enough for me.

About making all affiliates ENTITLED to 20% discount: well, it's pretty easy to become an affiliate, right? But why not? You'll adjust the price at some point anyhow, this will just be reflected in the price calculation, then, so I see no problem with that.

Ok, off to bed and on to plane tomorrow... cu guys.

Enjoy the holiday mate. And thanks so much for your helpful input.
Hopefully I'll be able to take care of things by myself while you are gone! :p

http://www.bitcointorrentz.com/images/bct_button_117_30.png - BitCoinTorrentz.com: High-speed HTTP torrent downloads. 0.05 btc/gb. Up to 50% discount with free membership!
mjcmurfy (OP)
Sr. Member
****
Offline Offline

Activity: 336
Merit: 250



View Profile WWW
September 19, 2011, 02:30:51 AM
 #99

I have now implemented a pseudo-unique payment system. The server will select a random address from a list of 100, and that will be used for the transaction. This minimizes the risk of others stealing your download, and adds an extra layer of privacy to the service.

I still do intend to transition to a unique based system at some point in the future, but I really would rather not run the bitcoin client on my server, where it is vulnerable to attack. I like having my wallet stored securely on an isolated machine that is not used for any other purpose.

So this is the best solution I can come up with right now, which I think is adequate for the purposes of bitcointorrentz. I would love to hear some feedback on this, especially what end-users think about it.

@molecular: by the way, I have also added the payment address to the final payment screen, as per your suggestion.

http://www.bitcointorrentz.com/images/bct_button_117_30.png - BitCoinTorrentz.com: High-speed HTTP torrent downloads. 0.05 btc/gb. Up to 50% discount with free membership!
Ricochet
Sr. Member
****
Offline Offline

Activity: 373
Merit: 250



View Profile
September 19, 2011, 05:21:47 AM
 #100

Regarding the fees and IP collection of affiliates, another way to look at it is that it's a 20% fee for the privilege of using the site 100% anonymously, instead of being required to register with an email address and associated IP address.  Obviously that's not a good marketing stance to take, but it's the way I think of it and I think it's entirely justified.
Pages: « 1 2 3 4 [5] 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 »
  Print  
 
Jump to:  

Powered by MySQL Powered by PHP Powered by SMF 1.1.19 | SMF © 2006-2009, Simple Machines Valid XHTML 1.0! Valid CSS!