Ever since the earliest days of Bitcoin development, proposal after proposal has been put forward for a BitTorrent client that incorporates bitcoin payments. In an ideal solution, Bitcoins would be sent from the client to the file's uploaders, also known as "seeders."

Not only would such a project make file sharing faster and more useful, but it would allow for a new industry to emerge, where selling data online becomes extremely easy to do, and where finding rare content online is faster and more efficient.

After many years of community discussion, a few failed attempts, and one near miss - that only allowed bitcoin donations - Oxford PhD computer scientist, Dr. Bedeho Mender has created an alpha version of a bitcoin-for-uploads bittorrent client, called JoyStream.

Billed on the website as "A new BitTorrent client, with faster speeds, streaming and paid seeding," Mender told in an exclusive interview that he has been working on this project since April 2014.

Mender spent months designing, and then started coding full-time 6 months ago.

JoyStream rewards seeders for providing bandwidth with micropayments, and this leads to much higher download speeds on all content.

While the idea of incentivizing seeders will grab the attention of many in the industry, the scalability of Bitcoin's transactions is an issue that may become restrictive to JoyStream.

If the network becomes very popular all of those transactions would likely pile up on the Bitcoin blockchain, especially if growth happens too quickly.

“Even though payment channels are used, you still need one transaction to start the channel, and one to close it.

This means that if people really start embracing JoyStream quickly, the transaction limit of 7 [Bitcoin transactions per second] will quickly be under strain," Mender explained.

Bitcoin core developers are currently working on a solution to the transaction speed problem, so with any luck this will not be an issue before JoyStream gets a chance to become that popular.