BitTorrent Is Now Part of TRON | Hacker News Reader

BitTorrent Is Now Part of TRON

blog.bittorrent.com

118 pointsyarapavan53 comments

TRON is a rip off of IPFS, and everybody knows that (Source, in case you forgot: https://twitter.com/juanbenet/status/950142785373405184 )

I mean, the homepage ( http://tron.network ) has a giant face of the "Founder" / "CEO" of the company... Glorious.

I am dropping my 50 cents here: I would not look at it as if Tron bought BitTorrent... I think it was the other way around: BitTorrent was financially known to not be very "healthy". I bet it was more BitTorrent looking for mo-mo-mo-money as a valid exit!

TRON is a dpos blockchain with a port of the ethereum virtual machine. Not sure where you get the IPFS part from.

I am not a TRON fan or investor but you have done some fine mental gymnastics there. They did bought BitTorrent. Source and legitimacy of their funds are questionable

Some argue that IPFS is a rip off of BitTorrent, and thus, the circle is complete: BT -> IPFS -> TRON -> BT

IPFS is a rip off of Freenet, with all the anonymity ripped out.

Yup, Bram Cohen moved on a while ago to his Chia.Network project, and the corporate owners of BitTorrent were just looking for an exit. TRON got a name brand and some tech that seems related to blockchain but not necessarily directly useful to it, and not Bram, and not sure what else.

(IMO) TRON fails to distinguish itself from other decentralized storage blockchain tokens/coins.

This move is a clever circular reasoning where taking their hype-driven valuation and using it to invest in a company that will give TRON more credibility.

Can HN help me understand why TRON is better than the sea of competition (Sia/Filecoin/Storj/Maidsafe/etc)?

EDIT: corrected 'syllogism'

> Can HN help me understand why TRON is better than the sea of competition

It's not. It's just a pump and dump scheme with no solid tech at all. 60% of all tokens were given privately for example.

There have also been allegations of plagiarism [1]

1 - https://finance.yahoo.com/news/exclusive-researchers-allege-...

TRON: for investors that don’t have a CLU.

> Can HN help me understand why TRON is better than the sea of competition (Sia/Filecoin/Storj/Maidsafe/etc)?

I have been following all those and based on the numerous articles I have read they are pretty much all failed. Blockchain just doesn't make sense for that application.

Filecoin hasn't launched yet. None of the others have much traction, but I'm not sure I'd call them failed yet.

TRON is just garbage though.

As someone who has also been following those projects, I actually think this is a great application for cryptocurrency. (Not necessarily blockchain; I'm pretty sure Maidsafe actually doesn't use a blockchain.)

The idea of a trustless, fully decentralized, scalable, redundant, anonymous storage market is pretty alluring, and I see no reason why it's not entirely achievable with current cryptocurrency technology.

I agree many of those platforms have issues, but from what I can tell those issues are mostly a result of the system's immaturity; not an inherent flaw in the idea of a decentralized storage system itself.

Here's my current take on each:

* Filecoin - Doesn't exist (yet). It's just a whitepaper; no actual software.

* Storj - Not actually decentralized (as currently implemented). Users need to go through a federated service (of which only one currently exists; the one run by the creators of Storj) to actually store their files.

* Maidsafe - I'm actually not sure. The developers of Maidsafe seem to be working on much, much more than just file storage, which means the project is very complex. In any case, the software is still too immature to actually use for real.

* Sia - This is actually pretty promising. A couple weeks ago I managed to upload and store a few GB worth of files on Sia for about $2/TB-month. Going to try using it for my online backups via Duplicati once I get a chance to play with it more. The core software is still pretty clunky though, and not recommended for production use.

* TRON - I have no idea. I haven't looked into it.

About Maidsafe: their goal is to build a new descentralised internet, and I think they still are in the alpha phase with testing on a big swarm of VPS's. It is a moonshot project, with all its pros and cons. And yeah, they use Rust ;)

TRON has one thing going for it - its name evokes a well known movie.

That's literally it

I suppose it's too much to hope that BitTorrent fights for the users now?

I am probably super wierd for this but my immediate thought was https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRON_project

The beauty of it is that as long as none of the cryptocurrency/blockchain projects manages to really achieve what they're set out to do the only objective metric to judge them is how much money they manage to pull. When everything is a scam it's kind of hard to single out anything. As such I suppose you could say that "TRON" is a pretty cool name, so buy buy buy.

Beyond that it really looks like a rather simple pump and dump. If you click the "technical docs" on the front page you end up here: https://tron.network/resources?name=1&lng=en

There are 3 PDFs here. "What is TRON" is a 7 page marketing brochure that's about as technical as the MacDonald's menu. The "Design Book of TRON architecture" sounds a lot more promising until you see that it's 12 pages long. It's extremely high level and doesn't tell you anything of value. Finally you have the "TRON Protobuf protocol" which is 10 pages long and exactly what it sounds like.

In other words, business as usual in the cryptocurrency world.

I gave a talk on cryptocurrencies a few weeks back and used Bittorrent as one of several examples of non-blockchain software/protocols that solve an important technological problem and don't require a blockchain.

Then I get home and read the news:

"Bittorrent: Now with Blockchain!!!"

Didn't some futurist warn about the threat of a sophisticated physical replication process getting out of control and turning everything into paperclips? Because it feels like we're already there in the digital domain.

The token use case for BitTorrent is so obvious, however, that this seems more like BitTorrent using Tron’s ICO money to make their own coin. The chances of them integrating all the other Tron BS is essentially zero.

getting JUSTed now means getting scammed... it comes from the Tron founder Justin Sun [1]. All he does is announce partnerships, real or fake (basically all fake up until this point), to pump his coin and quickly sell it off. Looks like this is one of the few real "partnerships" because everyone has caught on by now. He's also plagiarized mostly everything, code, whitepaper...

1. https://twitter.com/justinsuntron?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ct...

no, it comes from "just fuck my shit up": https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/brendan-frasers-alimony-just-...

How does Tron still exist? After the extremely public reveal of the Genesis scam - I'm confused.

what was the genesis scam, exactly?

People tried to scam people involved in TRON via Reddit : https://cryptovest.com/news/tron-genesis-hard-fork-an-elabor...

There is little reason in cryptocurrency markets. Verge is one of the craziest examples, with prices rising after shown 51 percents attacks, and prices falling after announcing a big partnership with Pornhub.

What product or service does (did?) BitTorrent offer?

Is there revenue stream purely from licensing the name?

And does Bram Cohen have any actual involvement in this crypto nonsense or is this him cashing out and walking away from it all?

Bram Cohen has his own crypto company called the Chia Network.

https://www.wired.com/2017/01/the-inside-story-of-bittorrent... has a pretty good summary of the corporate history of BitTorrent Inc. They had a number of ideas beyond just licensing their tech to other businesses, most of them focused on being some kind of media company.

They could as well have bought linux.com and claim those 1 billion Linux devices.

Is it just me... ? I didn't know you could "buy" bitTorrent.. ? I always just assume its "only" a protocol ? :S

They bought BitTorrent Inc, the company: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BitTorrent_(company)

I'm not 100% sure but I think BitTorrent Inc may own some patents applicable to the BitTorrent protocol: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/11/04/bittorrent_awarded_...

The protocol specification is public domain though: http://www.bittorrent.org/beps/bep_0003.html

What is TRON? I've tried reading official materials but there seems to be a lot of contention and misinformation swirling around this company/product.

Does this mean any kind of change in downloading an ISO of fedora or whatever? (Yes, I'm that boring and don't download movies or games via torrents, mostly I just watch stuff on Netflix or similar)

BitTorrent the company has been fairly far detached from the protocol and software introduced in 2001. The original client discontinued, µTorrent is proprietary, and launching various services like BitTorrent Sync and Play that really don't have anything to do with the protocol at all... I'm honestly surprised that the company still survives (though this may be why it's being acquired).

Long story short, no, it won't affect you using the protocol and Transmission or what-have-you to download Fedora ISOs.

BitTorrent Sync did do some smart things with the protocol, which is always why internal politics wound up causing it to spin out of BitTorrent the Company, which has continually tried to be a "media" company more than a tech company (which should explain BitTorrent Play, and kind of but not really explains why BitTorrent the company still exists at all in the same way that RealNetworks or WildTangent still exist in that "media" companies can be cockroaches).

So BitTorrent Sync is now Resilio Sync, and word has it most of the smart engineers jumped to that ship when it spun out.

Resilio Sync is an awesome product. Its amazing to be able to sync my pics from my Phone to my PC wireless over the Internet and to be able to sync Music and Movies from my PC to my phone over a Lan etc.

I've been using Syncthing for the same purpose.

Syncthing, Rsync, both open source and cross platform. Nextcloud also supports WebDAV IIRC.

For sending a file over LAN without using a protocol such as SSH, magic-wormhole works well.

SSH works fine for sending/receiving data, but like FTP it chokes with high amount of small files. So its best, as usual, to use tarballs or zips.

I especially appreciate the concept of Encrypted Shares where I can have devices participate in the sync, but not be able to read its contents. I don't know of another peer-to-peer sync tool with quite that same option. (There are several cloud storage options like Keybase that are close, but not quite the same as me spinning up a VM or always-on closet PC that I control top-to-bottom.)

TRON is Bitcoin Idiots, LLC, more or less. Yes, they're dragging the name of your favorite computer movie through the mud, just like Zoë Quinn did with Crash Override Network. Can hardly wait to see what kind of grift WarGames, Inc. or WOPR, Inc. will be.

I still have to steal movies from time to time--when after checking all the official, legal ways there is still no way to download it.

However, with Netflix and other studios finally getting their head out of their ass there is a lot less going for BitTorrent nowadays compared to a few years ago.

At least, that's my impression...

If both of these firms (I have no idea what TRON does) disappear tommorrow, would anyone notice?

It's called an exit scam. Many have done it, few notice and even fewer care.

In case anyone is still using the ad-plagued bitorrent.com client:

https://transmissionbt.com

Lots of features, easy to use.

For Windows users I'd recommend Deluge, because its interface is more like uTorrent but without all the adware and plus it's open source.

https://www.deluge-torrent.org/

I personally prefer qBittorent. Specifically the Portable version.

I see your deluge and raise it to https://www.qbittorrent.org/

qBittorrent is the best for me feature wise. Also cross platform.

I'm a fan of client-daemon architecture, such as Tmux/Screen and IRC bouncers.

With that in mind I can recommend Tmux/Screen + rtorrent (daemon, ncurses) [1] + flood (WebUI) [2] for if you don't have CLI. Works well in Docker.

[1] https://github.com/rakshasa/rtorrent

[2] https://github.com/jfurrow/flood

Take a look at WebTorrent Desktop, which supports instant streaming. Disclosure: I'm the author ;)

https://webtorrent.io/desktop/

Simple, straightforward torrent app.

Webtorrent Desktop user here... thanks for your work!

This is my go to torrent client. Simply delightful to use and very nice UI. Also the tech on webtorrent.io is awesome and not to be overlooked, thank you so much for making it!

uTorrent 2.x for lyfe.

Can be easily found on various mirror sites - just gotta be sure to never, ever, let it update beyond 2.2.1.

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