Tron Hoping For Napster-Like Revival Of P2P With BitTorrent Offering

If you have ever counted down the hours as your (often illegal) music file downloaded, then you probably remember the heady days of Napster and Lime Wire, as peer to peer file sharing was the norm.

As internet speeds got faster, interest in P2P wained and by the time streaming services such as Netflix arrived, the market was all but forgotten about but for techies.

Still, like the arcade game of Tekken, there's something that draws this millennial back to the P2P market. Which is why I was fascinated to hear that one of the largest blockchain based operating systems, Tron, has bought out Napster rival BitTorrent.

I grabbed the opportunity to chat to Tron CEO, Justin Sun, to find out exactly why he thinks P2P will bring blockchain to the masses, currently predicted to add 100 million monthly users to the blockchain sector.

Millennial market

With most of the Tron’s users being millennials like me, the 25 to 35-year-old age bracket is set to be the first major market that will be adopting peer to peer sharing on the blockchain. Sun told me that he is hoping the platform will create a file transfer ecosystem where users are incentivized by the idea of sharing their content with others.

Tron is already an innovator in increasing the use of blockchain and hopes that by easing the learning curve needed to use the technology, it will make the uptake more straightforward. In terms of what will be shared via BitTorrent, the possibilities are varied, but Sun sees music as a particularly promising sector. He said, “Our plan is to have lots of the artists share their work, but also even bring on board some independent directors they can share their films.”

As it stands, BitTorrent already has over 170 million monthly users, with their protocols moving up to 40% of the world’s Internet traffic every day. Often cited as a conceptual prototype of a decentralized internet, currently, files are not streamed by a central server but by the users themselves. The key part about this type of P2P protocol is that the more users who have a copy of the file, the faster it becomes downloaded as each user streams just part of the file. This means that movies can be downloaded in minutes.

With the arts set to be one of the main beneficiaries of the technology, Sun sees the future of P2P and decentralized technology combining with blockchain as a way to bring the technology into the mainstream, something that other concepts have yet to succeed in doing. Tron is planning on adding a token system to BitTorrent to incentivise sharing on the platform, until now, users would choose to block the system from seeing when a file had finished downloading.

But with the introduction of the incentivisation, Sun hopes it will encourage people to leave their computer open continuously in order to upload to the network.

"Very successful"

Sun says, "I think BitTorrent technology has lots in common with blockchain, for example, they both use like a P2P structure and also both use the decentralized technology. So that's why I think there will be very successful if we can combine that bit harder with the blockchain together.

"There is a problem inside of the BitTorrent ecosystem is there is no incentive for ceding and hosting the files. So that's why a lot of the people stop once they finish downloading. First of all, we are introducing the token incentive into the ecosystem so that people can leave their computer open and continuously upload to the network. Ultimately, it will benefit yourself so that's why I think it will work. I mean the whole robustness will see more downloading and the ecosystem will prosper. In quarter 3 we'll be asking artists to come on board, I see it as a platform for all file sharing. From music to art."

The platform economy has been receiving increasing amounts of attention, at upcoming Marketplace Risk Conference in San Francisco, Eleanor Tucker, a Gang Leader at GangHut will say that people should be paying more attention to the concept’s game-changing potential. She told the CBI “At the ‘business end’ of the platform economy are marketplace platforms: they allow you to exchange goods or services with other people, whether that’s by buying or selling (Etsy or Shpock) or by sharing (anything which could be described as ‘the Airbnb of…’). Exchanging services as opposed to goods is often described as the ‘gig economy’ (think TaskRabbit or Lyft) and exchanging money in the form of investment or loans is known as ‘peer to peer’ or ‘P2P’ finance (Zopa or Funding Circle).” When it comes to the benefits of P2P transactions, Tucker says there are many, including the fact that resources are being re-used, as opposed to extra resources being created, people have easier access to assets, and P2P sharing also allows users to become more empowered by taking greater control of their lifestyle.

Tron and BitTorrent are set to join a host of other successful P2P businesses that operate in a broad range of sectors. BookAClassic is an Airbnb-style platform that allows users to share their classic cars and for renters to enjoy driving cars that were previously solely driven by their owners. KERB operates a peer-to-peer parking rental system, where landowners can rent out parking spaces to those who are looking for affordable off-street parking.

It has a broad spectrum of services on offer that allows even large businesses or organizations to benefit from the system by allowing a single user to register multiple parking spaces. Even Boataffair works on a similar principle to BookAClassic, but allows P2P sharing of boats. Whereas Car & Away also offers users the chance to share their vehicles but uses cars that are parked in airport car parks, allowing car owners to make money from their cars when they are on vacation.

With users interested in 'what's in it for them?' Could this be it? Only time will tell but maybe Tron will crack the blockchain market via P2P– After all, we millennials do love a revival.