Crypto & Torrents: The Perfect Match?
vTorrent Guides*
The official vTorrent information page is
here*
Where to get the latest vTorrent client here*
What interest do you get from staking? 5% by default, but it's subject to keeping your wallet staking. See
here*
Video - How to set-up config file to sync with other users
here*
Video - How to set-up 2FA within the wallet
here*
Video - How to unlock wallet for staking only
here*
Video - How to use simple chat feature within wallet
here*
Video - How to use API to link wallet to Bittrex exchange to buy/sell VTR from your own wallet
here*
Client won't sync to the network, no connections? Wallets newer than 0.8.1.1 should not have this problem as a network crawler is included. Anyone with problems, see adding seeds and crawler instructions
here*
Open or closed source? Parts of the client, the 2FA security feature ONLY, is closed source until the project is more established and then it will all be open sourced. Confirmation details are
here*
Are BitTorrent files free or paid for? It will be up to users to decide if they want to charge for seeding. If charging for seeding, it will be done by charging for bandwidth or cost per mb. See
here and
here *
Are transaction anonymous? Yes, if you want them to be. The client can use a similar type of encryption to Monero
{
suggestRingSize()
449 if (fDebugRingSig)
450 LogPrintf("sendCoinsAnon()\n");*
Does vTorrent support mobile? Yes. But that feature is not yet released. See details
here
# Mobile devices
15 android:ios{
16 CONFIG += mobility
17 MOBILITY =
18 }
19
*
Is TOR or I2P supported? The clients seem to have the code to support both TOR and I2P if you know what you are doing
enum Network
{
NET_UNROUTABLE = 0,
NET_IPV4,
NET_IPV6,
NET_TOR,
NET_I2P,
NET_MAX,
};
*
Does the wallet support HD back-up? Yes.
BIP-0032:
https://github.com/bitcoin/bips/blob/master/bip-0032.mediawikiThis document describes hierarchical determinstic wallets (or "HD Wallets"): wallets which can be shared partially or entirely with different systems, each with or without the ability to spend coins.
BIP-0039:
https://github.com/bitcoin/bips/blob/master/bip-0039.mediawikiThis BIP describes the implementation of a mnemonic code or mnemonic sentence -- a group of easy to remember words -- for the generation of deterministic wallets.
BIP-0044:
https://github.com/bitcoin/bips/blob/master/bip-0044.mediawikiThis BIP defines a logical hierarchy for deterministic wallets based on an algorithm described in BIP-0032 (BIP32 from now on) and purpose scheme described in BIP-0043 (BIP43 from now on).
*
Will torrents be stored on the blockchain? Not sure yet. It is likely that the client will have its own version of BitTorrent running, so you may not need to store magnet links or torrent file links on the blockchain. Instead, you may interact with BitTorrent functionality built in, using an internal token that gets interchanged with vTorrent currency
*
Is vTorrent illegal software? No. vTorrent is a dual use software tool. For example, BitTorrent is legal because you can use it for legal purposes. If people choose to use it for illegal purposes, then they are breaking the law. Please report them to the local authorities. You can read about the most famous dual use case law which makes software like vTorrent legal
here and
here*
Does the client support anonymous social networking? Yes. That is a planned feature. Riot is like a slack channel. It currently runs on the Matrix network and servers, but vTorrent is planning to implement Riot and run it on the vTorrent network. The alternative is to use a simple iFrame to load a Riot chat channel into the client. See
here
Join
here*
Will vTorrent support classified listings and or a market? That is an open feature request
A few projects are attempting to combine Crypto with Torrents. I will be keeping track of them and updating this thread. Help and views welcome.
JoyStream
http://www.joystream.co/VTorrent (VTR)
ThePirateBayCoin (TPB)
Darkleaks download links embedded off the Bitcoin blockchain
NXT
https://nxtforum.org/general-discussion/(preview)-torrents-plugin/[9-Feb-15: Will likely be adding
Storj]
Keyrun, Magnet links on Bitcoin blockchain
blockchain
LBRY:
http://lbry.io/[please let me know of any others]
I like the idea of an in-wallet crypto<>torrent combination vs. an approach like
Datacoin. It makes a lot of sense to me. Here is broadly why:
A good article giving a nice summary on Bittorrent and Crypto: Could Cryptocurrency Improve P2P File Sharing?
http://www.coindesk.com/could-cryptocurrency-improve-file-sharing/Torrents Face CompetitionThere are several new ways to get free content that is much easier and safer. For example:
1. YouTube provides free music now. Torrents did well at the start because people were distributing music.
2. XMBC distributes movies and TV shows. Torrents didn't do that very well because of file sizes. crypto torrents won't fix that issue or compete well with XBMC unless the seeders want to earn something from their work.
3. sourceforge, github, softpedia and download.com do free software and sponsored bundles / trials.
Where I think a project such as VTorrent (I don't think TPB has a good enough incentive / economic model for seeders) can create a new category that sits well with the above is through seeder's greed and rights owners need to earn money and stem the tide of people that freely distribute their content.
Digital Rights Owners New Friend - CryptoRather than pose a threat to rights owners, I think projects like TPB and VTR have the potential to solve the bandwidth issues that the internet is facing because of the growth in streaming videos.
[update 13 April 2015]
Rights holders going after torrent users, ISPs forced to disclose information.
This is such a bad move on the part of the rights holders. It will only come back to bite them in other ways. They should figure out ways to make streaming movies easier for people and package up movies to make it more compelling to rent new films online rather than force people to use Torrents or force them to cinemas.
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2015-04-07/dallas-buyers-club-isps-must-hand-over-customer-details/6375358I also think that digital rights owners can actually use projects like this to save their antiquated business models.
Why? Because what they are doing is figuring out a way for seeders to get paid for seeding. Paying distributors. But wait - that's what rights holders do, they pay distributors to distribute their stuff.
If you create, for example, a wallet that flashes up ads, or finds some other way to bring the YouTube and Spotify ad revenue model, then rights owners can pay seeders for being their distribution channel. The money payment side could be in crypto.
Just imagine if rights holders could distribute a movie around the world, on the same day, and charge $2 pay per view. What if you had 300m people being able to watch the movie the day it was released? Each film would potentially be a blockbuster in terms of revenue.
Now you don't need the $1bn movies to subsidies the small productions that lose money, which are the vast majority of movies. Now every movie makes a profit. Hundreds of millions of users, very little distribution and marketing costs. As soon as you finish rendering the movie, you can release it to your army of torrent seeders.
Crypto Torrent Seeders Saving the Internet
Crypto <> torrent seeders become local delivery networks, making movie distribution 1,000,000,000% more efficient.
Movies in particular are file size intensive and getting paid to seed would actually help rights owners and the internet which some suggest is starting to suffer from video streaming overload, leading some to want to bring in priority use charges. This is a two-tier internet where those that have get faster speeds and those that don't have get buffering.
Rights owners don't have a way to stop services like XBMC/Kodi. What they do have are marketing budgets, distribution budgets and revenue share models.
Making crypto seeders part of their distribution model and paying them for providing a backbone to that distribution channel becomes part of the net neutrality debate. Any residential street in the USA can have teens sitting in their bedrooms seeding movies to their neighbours, like a LAN (local area network), thereby removing the burden on the internet infrastructure to distribute movies at peak times - both the movie distributors and the internet service providers and possibly the cable providers could pay the teens in crypto to reduce the load off broader internet.
[Analogy of sorts. A similar model is used in logistics. Large ships move containers to ports. Large containers are transported to a few national hubs and unloaded. From there average size delivery vehicles collect deliveries going to the same region serving particular towns and cities. From the regions, smaller still delivery vehicles go door-to-door. That's much more efficient then sending large deliveries from the container ships direct to each door.]
Revenue From BundlingMozilla earns a fortune each year distributing software for Yahoo and others. Software providers can use a similar model to pay seeders to distribute their software and share in the bundling of third party software such as anti-virus, browsers, etc.
Seeders As Paid Distributorsupdate 4 Feb 2015
ISPs have been throttling and shutting down torrents or torrent related sites. Relatively new
services that provide an anonymous torrent link download service have started to form. These are usually paid for services that mask the torrent nature of the download.
https://untorrent.me/The fight against torrents is pushing services into the darknet and people are paying to access these torrent services.
White Hat TorrentsLinking Torrents to Crypto means there is the opportunity to send information to the blockchain to confirm when a customer has purchased or trialled software or other content from a seeder. That seeder can prove they seeded and can expect to get paid. This is similar to affiliate programs.
Torrent's using the crypto model actually help to define a way to tap into financial incentives that can solve the headache faced by rights holders - their content is digital and can be distributed freely on the internet after it is released.
If crypto projects such as VTR and TPB can show a way to integrate some of the above and perhaps even more, into a wallet, then we will truly have something groundbreaking: P2P was first labelled as a disaster for digital rights owners. What if P2P crypto actually showed rights owners a way to use the medium to make their distribution far more efficient and in so doing switch free seeders into its partner network?
For crypto, rights owners that turn seeders into distributors, well I think they would push crypto and promote it like no one else can.
VTR / TPB and others like them could be a big threat to Netflix (Netflix is actually nothing more than one big seeder distributing content) on the one hand and the friend of movie, music and software producers on the other.
Throttling Policies (UK, Feb 2015)Traffic Management Policy for one of the UK's main broadband suppliers:
If you’re a Sky Broadband Connect customer we want you to have the fairest service possible.
This Network Management Policy means as a Sky Broadband Connect customer online at peak times you may experience slower speeds when using the network because bandwidth is shared equally amongst all Sky Broadband Connect customers. Peak times are the busiest periods of the day when the highest number of Connect customers are online at the same time. They are typically from 5pm to midnight each day and all day at weekends.
This is likely to be more noticeable if you’re using applications that require a lot of bandwidth or you’re streaming video, particularly in HD.
When fewer Sky Broadband Connect customers are online at the same time there’s more bandwidth to share around so the length of time it takes to do data heavy activities is less.
The Challenge? Magnet LinksHow Magnet Links Are Different From .Torrent FilesWhen you download a .torrent file, you're essentially downloading a small file that contains information on the larger files you want to download. The torrent file tells your torrent client the names of the files being shared, a URL for the tracker, and more. Your torrent client then calculates a hash code, which is a unique code that only that torrent has—kind of like an ISBN or catalog number. From there, it can use that code to find others uploading those files, so you can download from them.
A magnet link does away with the middleman. A magnet link is essentially a hyperlink containing the hash code for that torrent, which your torrent client can immediately use to start finding people sharing those files. Magnet links don't require a tracker (since it uses
DHT), nor does it require you to download a separate file before starting the download, which is convenient.
update 3-Feb-2015
Sell and buy information anonymously
Darkleaks is a decentralised blackmarket where you can sell information. It has a mechanism for trustless authentication of documents that are being sold through a novel cryptographic mechanism. The authentication is fair, provably fair.
The software uses Bitcoin’s block chain to encrypt files which are released when payment is claimed by the leaker. Files are split into segments and encrypted. These segments are unlocked only when the leaker reveals the key by claiming his Bitcoins.
There is no identity, no central operator and no interaction between leaker and buyers. We encourage everyone to download Darkleaks now and start building.
https://medium.com/@ZozanCudi/darkleaks-information-blackmarket-1ee5ac28c892I think this is one of those areas that will push bitcoin prices, and altcoin prices along with it, to new highs.
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=932096.msg10231367#msg10231367Forget Coinbase getting regulated. Forget ETFs. This is the next big news explosion for bitcoin and bitcoin prices.
Just look at how many torrent clients got downloaded over the last year or two
People love to download stuff, for free.
Take into account sensitive information leaks, and bitcoin will be in the media every single day. Front page news, every news channel. Every major leak will be broadcast around the world - the latest leak and how to find it.
If confidential commercial information gets posted into Bitcoin and ransom demands are made and people want paying in Bitcoin, then businesses will be buying tens of thousands of bitcoins in order to pay ransoms.
Update 4-Jan-15
DarkLeaks has a few issues. It should be noted that it is an alpha level code release, so issues are to be expected.
* People can sell data, but the buyer can resell the same data.
* Currently, binary data can't be verified as complete. The process adopted uses a random selection of 20% of the source is revealed to the purchaser.
* Randomly selecting 20% of data to release to potential buyers to prove the data is worth something, means that buyers can attempt a number of different purchases until they get all the data for free.
* Buyers can lock-up the files by never completing a transaction. That is being addressed with an expiry date selected by the seller.
* Sellers of movies can compile a 2 hour video of the same clip
* Being based on bitcoin, IP addresses and traffic analysis might eventually yield the sellers identity
* Selling movies, songs, software still requires a hosting solution. This is likely to be torrents, at the moment. So there is no incentive for buyers when they can get the same data for free on other torrents.
MegaNetupdate 17-Feb-2015, not sure what this is going to be about, but it's got some references to movies, so bet you're going to be connecting to somewhere that makes movie downloads relatively easy and secure.
https://twitter.com/KimDotcom/status/567447284250443776You become the MegaNet
http://www.coindesk.com/blockchain-play-role-kim-dotcoms-uncensorable-internet/Update 31 Nov-15
An interesting addition, few details as yet:
http://cointelegraph.com/news/115518/lbry-the-lovechild-of-bitcoin-bittorrent-storjtl;drCrypto and Torrents are likely to merge. Buy as much bitcoin and altcoins related to this area as you can (within the limits of what you can afford to lose).
Disclosure:
I like this category. I currently hold some VTR. I will probably hold some TPB when it is available.
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