I guess my only question, ik_do - if there's no torrent code at all available to fork from, why would a developer want to come and takeover/fork this project versus just starting a new one without all the headache/baggage?
There's a number of things that make the project interesting. Including exchange listing and mostly the age, there's no chance you would get a coin to get this sort of market or community attention nowadays unless you were throwing major money behind it.
Regardless I am only optimistic about this project in a very cautious manner. Given the reappearing act that occurred recently my own personal interest has reduced quite significantly. I'm not sure of the worth of putting time, energy and money behind a project if it's going to end up being a game of whack-a-mole with the developer.
The same developer who so far has dodged every question relating to the status of the project and only seems to appear when competing projects are bought up.
Besides this, there has been another competing project which has come to my attention recently. Although I don't care for the project personally and don't have any interest in investing in it, it did bring to light one of the key limitations of trying to implement torrents on a blockchain, which is something I touched upon in the slack some time ago--they would have to be different torrent files and other torrent clients would thus be incompatible with them.
This is a huge factor in everything. Whether there is another project or not, I'm not so sure that torrents are the way to go anymore. I'm still interested in a marketplace for files and bandwidth, but the key question right now is whether torrents are the technology to achieve this.
The best question I'm asking myself right now is if a Bittorrent / Bitcoin implementation is pretty much the holy grail and there have been at least somewhere in the region of 10-15 projects to attempt it... How come none have had anything to show for it?
Of particular note is JoyStream, which has had the most backing of any project I'm aware of in this space (in the region of millions as far as I'm aware, but I can't find an exact figure). One would assume that with such a large financial backing the project would flourish, but instead, it hasn't had a release in something like 2 years. The team still update their reddit and such by replying to people who are interested, but they haven't really shared any progress in quite some time.
JoyStream's biggest limitation has of course been the fact that its been engineered to run off of Bitcoin.
3 months ago in June, the founder of JoyStream made a comment about the $150 million USD that Bancor had received in funding:
"As someone actually building a decentralized application on bitcoin, it really makes me think what I am giving up in terms of community support and funding by staying on the platform."
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source)
Supposing that JoyStream pivots to a new platform besides Bitcoin at any point in the near future (which is main criticism most people have of it, being that Bitcoin transactions are hugely expensive and Bitcoin is not suited to thousands of small transactions) then this project has no real purpose.
Again, I've been touching on the subject of the 'race' to deliver the kind of idea that vTorrent (presumably) has been in previous posts on here. At any time another entity can easily move, shift or create something entirely new that could win the race before this project or any other. It's a bad prospect to be in a space of daily dramatic change (for instance the recent resurfance of pnoch) and keep the ship sailing towards the same heading.
Your comment holds true, I have no doubts about it. It would take a significant amount of time to even get a fork started, and time is not something that we can just assume is on our side because the other 15 attempts at Torrent on blockchain never made a dent. Project number 16 might come along in 10 minutes time.
