Project Atlas | Hacker News Reader

Project Atlas

bittorrent.com

133 pointshumbfool299 comments

> Project Atlas will connect the BitTorrent peer-to-peer network and the TRON blockchain network via a set of bittorrent protocol extensions, a custom token, and an in-client token economy to address existing limitations and open a new borderless economy for exchanging value for computer resources on a global scale.

I prefer the currencies of goodwill, altruism and data hoarding to provide humanity with access to media.

They are not exclusive to each other.

I agree, but isn't this the current system, which flaws (too many leechers not enough seeders) this project is trying to solve?

I have not seen that flaw in ages as I am part of communities where giving and taking is rewarded with nothing but meaningless points and merit. It works fine.

I'm sure. I personally never been part of communities more or less because of laziness, but I could see that if this is something getting embedded into the clients directly, it could be a solution.

Adding money to this would easily kill the good intentions of people involved. I don't think it is a right idea.

but it's not money tho. You get tokens that you can only use on the torrent network, I think to have more seed powers. Kind of like if you could use your karma you've accumulated on your torrent community to get better seeds.

I don't think it'd be a bad idea, as it would push more people to seed. I know I'd seed more :)

That already exists with bonuspoints within torrent communities. It works well.

This Atlas thing is all about extracting real money. The owner of BitTorrent Inc is a cryptocoin scammer.

It's been a solved problem in private tracker communities - where users leach bandwidth is on a credit system and they need to maintain a ratio of upload/download to keep their access.

What TRON is trying to do is sell tokens to users to be able to access bandwidth. Where do these tokens come from to begin with? TRON just whips them up for free.

If I remember right, a famous Bittorrent group based out of the UK called Oink was shut down because they took donations for running the site. One can imagine the same fate would await TRON once the tokens are found facilitating pirated MPAA and copyright IP works.

I’d posit that such a setup will lead to users with low speed connection or connections which aren’t online constantly to be banned or required to buy a pardon from the site when not fulfilling the seeding requirement (as every site policy I’ve seen required maintaining a ratio over time).

This happens because users with high speed connections are incentivized to seed well beyond 1:1 and thus there is rarely any demand for seeding. Downloading is super fast which just exasperates the problem as your share ratio drops below the acceptable rate quickly.

Thus such sites tend to make their money off the people who can likely afford it the least, while rewarding people with the disposable income required to live in a neighborhood with unlimited high speed internet and pay for said service.

There’s also the matter of keeping content alive to consider. I’d consider it much more valuable to keep content with no or relatively few seeders alive than incentivizing seeders to add additional bandwidth to already popular torrents. I has not seen an site policy which encourages this, rather it likely punishes such activities as it bans users who are trying to reach a required share ratio without constant demand thus taking the content offline rather than keeping it available.

Whether or not Project Atlas will enable incentives for all users and multiple scenarios or if it will simply perpetuate a similar system to what is seen in the private torrenting communities remains to be seen.

Ok I stand corrected, thanks for the detailed answer.

private trackers have been implementing a solution for over a decade that this project seemingly does on a rudimentary level: 'bonus points' for seeding a file after snatching it, which accrues the longer you help seed. the points can be spent however the tracker software is written, be it profile/forum customizations, additional access, or reclaiming ratio.

In demand content always has plenty of seeders. The stuff that dies is obscure content or large archives. Someone only cares about the data once a year when doing research or something. This network won't solve this because there is no profit in storing data that is very rarely archived. Its a hard problem because you need to rank data on how valuable it is.

A dump of GeoCities is rarely used but has great value. A 1tb archive of videos of me counting grains of sand is also rarely used but worthless.

And how would this crypto coin thing help here? Nothing in the announcement deals with obscure, large content.

I don't think it will. What it will do is stop people seeding content just for others benefit and not expecting a reward.

TRON is the greatest scam the world has seen. Justin Sun hyped the price to unreal levels without a product, then sold at the height around new years ’17/18. Bought BitTorrent with the money. I’d stay far away from TRON

https://www.trustnodes.com/2018/01/08/trons-whitepaper-copie...

It's amazing that such a clearly fraudulent project acquired any funding to begin with.

I was just coming here to say the same. I can't believe anything positive related to Tron is on top of HN. It is a very well documented scam and obvious scam.

I wouldn't say "greatest scam the world has seen"; that's really selling the grand history of scams short. TRON may have been profitable, but it was not terribly clever or high-effort; the crypto-speculation space was just abnormally high in unreasonably-enthusiastic suckers.

Fair enough, but TRON created $14B out of thin air.

"$14B" on paper - but the real value of what could be extracted from market sells would be immensely less.

Those numbers are based on the market spot price, and not the order book support from real world buyers. Cryptocoin exchanges are mostly bots and the order books are mostly loaded with spoofed bids that are pulled away once real buyers and sellers start pushing one way or the other, hence the volatility.

I'm actually kind of speechless to see this on the top of HN.

This is a colossal scam. Not just scammy or unethical, but an ACTUAL scam.

I could be wrong, but if it Tron is indeed a scam, why take the money earned by selling at the high, and reinvest into the company? Why did he not just exit? Tron has dropped ~90% since the bull market high as have most alts, why are they still hiring developers and opening offices?

While I acknowledge the white paper was a fiasco, and they have made plenty of errors, it appears that the project itself is still actively under development and working towards some sort of goal. I am not vouching on the talent of their management though, I do have concerns there. I have a hard time calling a project that is under active development and investing in itself via developer hires, new offices and acquisitions a scam especially when the opportunity to exit was there.

The project had an inauspicious start but I feel the word scam does not belong here. Just my 2 cents. (Disclosure: I have a small bag. ~$150)

What happened to IPFS and Filecoin? Project Atlas seems to be bad copy of that since it is very much connected with TRON scam: https://twitter.com/juanbenet/status/950142785373405184

And Filecoin is not a "scam"? So far there has been no proof that "proof of replication" and "proof of spacetime" is even possible.

Can you point me to some resources on this topic. Would be quite interesting for me.

The burden of proof is on those who claim it works

Here's Proof of Spacetime:

https://filecoin.io/filecoin.pdf

and here's Proof of Replication:

https://filecoin.io/proof-of-replication.pdf

"Project Atlas will connect the BitTorrent peer-to-peer network and the TRON blockchain network via a set of bittorrent protocol extensions, a custom token, and an in-client token economy to address existing limitations and open a new borderless economy for exchanging value for computer resources on a global scale."

How did we get to the point where words simply don't mean anything anymore?

by paying exorbitant amounts for bullshit.

Now you know how the average person feels when reading something nerdy.

Just say they twisted some magic streams and marshmallow-man happend.

Yes and no. I think even an average Joe or Jane will quickly notice that "nerdy words" usually have pretty specific (if complex) meanings, whereas this... this is just mostly line noise.

You can learn the nerdy things and understand what you're reading. No amount of learning will lead you to understanding bullshit like this.

The video[1] does sliglty a lot better job of explaining what's going on.

[1] - https://youtu.be/n_BA8tUlRLA?t=63

You mean proactive award winning innovative solutions leveraging state of the art leading technologies don't engage with industry standard customer expectations on value proposition, or what?

I paradigmed in my pants.

What you said also doesn't mean anything.

This specific line is not a good example of meaningless words. It makes intelligible comprehensible sense and describes the project well. What problem do you have with it?

"Project Atlas will connect the BitTorrent peer-to-peer network [the existing network, utilizing the existing BitTorrent protocol] and the TRON blockchain network [TRON blockchain exists, it's a separate project, look it up] via a set of bittorrent protocol extensions, a custom token [not the TRON token itself, but a sub-token used for the purposes of project Atlas specifically], and an in-client [the functionality will be built-in into the BitTorrent client, the users will not have to use any extra software or web platform] token economy [economic system where tokens are used as means of transfer of value] to address existing limitations [rare torrents becoming hard to find seeds for, fakes, etc..] and open a new borderless [global, not contained within a single country or economic region of the world, users from any countries will be able to participate] economy for exchanging value [Atlas tokens, maybe other cryptos through exchanges] for computer resources [storage space and bandwidth used to store and distribute a torrent file] on a global scale."

"There is a problem with torrents - nobody want to seed. Let's create new coin - using TRON blockchain - to reward seeders automatically" would be the same, but with no bullshit.

Making it a better sentence is possible, making the system itself exist in the real world much less so. You can't make systems like this as described due to the reality that all decentralized systems face; the sybil problem, and by extension all the problems that occur when people try to solve that with a web of trust.

Why does it work in Bitcoin and other PoW blockchains?

It didn't work; that's why Bitcoin has steadily become more centralized until it became non-decentralized enough to be practical.

So are we arguing semantics now and the exact definition of the word "decentralized"? Well alright, let's agree about this for the sake of argument.

What stops this proposed project from working in the same "decentralized" way that Bitcoin and other PoW schemes are "decentralized" right now, and are working practically? Why wouldn't it work in torrents?

"There is a problem with torrents - nobody want to seed. So let's require users to pay us money for our penny stock tokens"

Ok, I'll bite.

...will connect the BitTorrent peer-to-peer network and the TRON blockchain network => BitTorrent will start accepting "coins"

a custom token => a new "coin"

an in-client token economy => the "coin" will only be valid for downloading torrents

to address existing limitations => too many leechers, not enough seeders

and open a new borderless economy => will be valid across nation-state boundaries

for exchanging value for computer resources => bandwidth and storage

Translation:

BitTorrent will start accepting a new type of "coin" that will only be valid within the BitTorrent network to allow leechers to pay seeders to download files.

Do the seeders generate the coins specific to each torrent, or is this some sort of scam where coins are made by TRON and users now have to pay for what's already free..?

I have no clue! That said, from the website:

> Users can earn tokens for continuing to seed files after a download is complete

> Users who participate will exchange tokens with each other on the basis of resources provided, not mining

Seems like you get paid when you seed, and you can use what you earned to download other stuff. How's the initial money generated? No idea. Maybe you've to buy the tokens for real $$$ or bitcoins or something. Or maybe you can choose to host a file and gather tokens.

Wait. Howcome I understood every word of that, got the meaning and even the author's intention?

Explain what it means then, without using any blockchain buzzwords (decentralized, web of trust, proof of work etc.)

"Gee, wouldn't it be nice if leechers could pay seeders instead of just leeching? There's a lot of hype right now about a tech that's supposedly good for building various kinds of Magic Internet Money; maybe we could integrate some form of that."

("decentralized" at least actually means something here - BitTorrent is already a decentralized protocol, there are no central BitTorrent servers that coordinate things. So anything that would be properly integrated with BitTorrent would have to be decentralized somehow.)

With cheap music streaming services such as spotify, apple music and google play as well as video streaming such as netflix and amazon, does anyone need bittorrent anymore? At least in first world countries? Besides, bittorrent works great as is, if people start making money on seeding, they will be way easier targets in court when sued by majors. What's the advantage here?

You're falsely assuming bittorrent is only good for piracy. It's ideal for distributing larger - legitimate - files, such as games and game updates, which can easily be 50 - 100 GB. While those could be served by e.g. a cloud edge provider, the publisher would still have to pay per GB. Offloading that load to multiple host locations and clients will save a lot of money and network capacity. Imagine a game on launch day that has been bought a million times - not a stretch of the imagination. That's a hundred petabytes of data that has to be distributed across the world on launch day for a 100 GB game.

For large legitimate files, services like WeTransfer or Dropbox have made BitTorrent not really that useful anymore. Cloud storage prices keep going down, as well. As for games, it's uncommon to solve distribution this way. Usually your game will be in one of the big platforms, like Steam. Use cases for BitTorrent have narrowed quite a bit. There are still some uses, sure, but it's not like it used to be.

In 2016 Netflix only offered 31 of the top 250 IMDb movies. Don't know where we are now, but in my country I am surprised when a movie I want to watch is available on Netflix. People do not make money on seeding, they gain internet points, aka coins.

The advantage here is that the protocol itself will incentivise people to seed instead of doing a hit & run, and will thus increase the value of the network.

Not sure it will work, but the experiment is interesting.

Not to mention that it gets worse with the old publishers all wanting to start their own streaming services and having made Netflix block VPNs.

It's as if they saw a drop in piracy and asked themselves how to make it rise again.

> With cheap music streaming services such as spotify, apple music and google play as well as video streaming such as netflix and amazon, does anyone need bittorrent anymore?

Yes people need bittorrent, first of all "cheap" is subjective, not everybody can afford to pay each month to watch movies/series and listen to music. Then there is a limit to what can offer Netflix or Amazon for example: I love movies and I watch a lot of them at the theater and at home but I can't find any Cronenberg's or Lynch's (yes I like Davids) movies on Netflix/Amazon. Even finding them on DVD/Bluray is difficult sometimes even with classics.

And there I am talking only about big directors movies, I am french and watch a lot of french movies but when I try to find old ones or just some with low budget it is nearly impossible besides torrents.

So yes we need bittorent/stremio but I wish we don't and that culture will be available to everyone someday.

Americans often fail to realize that catalogs of these services are usually smaller (often much smaller) in other countries. You can actually watch, say, Eraserhead on many platforms - if you're in the US. But try that in a small country, even in the EU, and you're out of luck.

I think the services still have some way to go. I subscribe to Netflix, Now Tv and Amazon Prime in the UK. There are still things I can't find, quite a few things that disappear from Netflix or NowTv when we're not done watching, only to reappear as paid content on Prime. There are a lot of movies just not available on either.

I don't know how this can be solved, but at present whilst there is definitely more than enough good tv content to keep me happy, there are definitely still holes and edge cases.

That said, this all sounds like a way to monetise piracy using cryptocurrency, not something I'd want to encourage.

(Spotify basically took over all music listening years ago, I no longer bother adding to my own collection, bar very infrequent CD purchases for some of my very favourite bands)

Let's talk purely about piracy for a second, as a legitimate use for legitimate owners, based on something that happened to me a couple of days ago:

I own two copies of this game, From Dust (which is fantastic, by the creator of Another World), one of them on disc and one of them on Steam, separate keys.

I installed it from Steam because I don't have an optical drive handy and the key is not on the case for some reason. So the game makes me sign up for a UPlay account (in addition to having the Steam stuff), which apparently I did in the past, and not with my primary email. So I can't play because it's already activated... and installing it from Steam doesn't tell UPlay that I own it on Steam.

So then I go and email Ubisoft tech support and say I have this key and haven't played in 5 years how can I swap it over to my new email.

A day later I get a reply that they want me to go screenshot my transaction history and my CD Key (which I already sent them) in the Steam UI.

...meanwhile, I was able to download ("pirate") and install the game in 5 minutes, and it doesn't require either the Steam or the Uplay account to work. AND it'll keep on working 50 years after Steam and Ubisoft are both bankrupt (or keep working on your OS/vm/whatever when Steam and Ubisoft discontinue support for it).

So yeah, there's a use for bittorrent & piracy, since DRM ruins your ability to archive any-damn-thing now. Without bittorrent, playing that game would be a terrible ordeal, if it is even possible at all. Paying for it (twice) only made it worse.

This is one of the reasons I make efforts to buy games via gog.com rather than Steam (the other reason is that Steam is dangerously close to a monopoly, and that never ends well).

Gog and the Humble Bundle (if they offer a DRM free version; these days a lot of titles just have Steam Keys).

You do lose the save game/cloud sync, but you gain copies of your game that will always work without needing to verify your licence over the Interwebs.

Lots of the games I've bought have cloud synced saves on gog too.

> Humble Bundle (if they offer a DRM free version; these days a lot of titles just have Steam Keys)

I've been griping lately that Humble Bundle seems increasingly watering down their principles. Early Humble Bundle made it a big deal that they always included DRM free copies and more often than not full soundtracks or soundtracks at a discount. Today's Humble Bundle seems much more and more to "just" be a Steam Key reseller, without DRM free copies of many games, and without access to nearly as large of a percentage of game soundtracks.

(I realize that last is a weird gripe, but there were a lot of games I picked up for their soundtracks because of artists I enjoyed, and sometimes I'd be surprised and really enjoy the associated game, but even if I didn't like the game I still got my money's worth from the soundtrack. I've now switched to buying from the artists more often directly from Bandcamp and rarely if ever buying the associated games, or just waiting for a direct Steam or Microsoft Store sale.)

It certainly feels from Humble's emails that they are very deeply focused on their Monthly Pass, and it feels almost to the detriment of everything else, but then Monthly Pass things don't really appeal to me in general.

Related, Gog recently started https://fckdrm.com/

What.cd had over one million unique releases (albums), whereas Google Music, Spotify and Apple Music usually claim to have around 30-50 million songs. The most common complaint about Netflix I hear is that their selection is quite pathetic as well. The advantage I see is the user-friendliness, organization, and community that comes out of having a huge library that isn't restricted to just mainstream material predominantly from a few countries.

> With cheap music streaming services such as spotify, apple music and google play as well as video streaming such as netflix and amazon, does anyone need bittorrent anymore?

When it's about music/video, although I still listen/watch Spotify/Netflix, I actually prefer to have the tunes I love stored in bare audio files, DRM-free, and play them without using an Internet connection, I also prefer to watch movies on my non-smart internet-detached TV by just putting them on a USB flash drive. But I hardly ever download music or videos from BitTorrent actually (although I have indeed downloaded rips of some albums I have legitimately bought on CDs in the past), BitTorrent is not only about pirating this kind of content. I also doubt there would be much progress in ease of access and affordability in the recording industry without competition with the file-sharing world.

> well as video streaming such as netflix and amazon

And about a few hundreds of other services worldwide with each their silos. Even for Netflix or Amazon Prime, it’s not the same catalog in the different regions they’re supported.

It’s of course made worse by the fact that any new entrant needs exclusives to lure people in, so every new service comes with its new silo.

It’s still a huge mess with no simple way to watch something legally from a simple search, even with a credit card in hand.

Music has become better (still super messy, spotify/apple music/Google cover a huge base, but it’s still only a fraction of what’s commercially sold in my experience)

Yes, not only for people that want things for free, but also people that want control over their media. If artist X decides to blacklist spotify/google play because they don't like it or whatever, or they make some deal with a competitor, etc. You can no longer listen to it on spotify.

This scenario already exists with netflix, you now have to have netflix, amazon prime, hulu, youtube premium and whatever disney's new streaming service will be called. Because each contains their own exclusives, and with some cases they won't contain the same products forever.

So now you have to juggle between different apps to get whatever media you're trying to access. As for bittorrent, if you're tech literate, you can setup an automatic downloading/streaming setup in 1-2 afternoons and have all the stuff you want, in one place, forever, at the low cost of $25 per terabyte.

> Besides, bittorrent works great as is, if people start making money on seeding, they will be way easier targets in court when sued by majors. h

Only until we have implementations of anonymous private and metadata resistant DHTshttps://news.ycombinator.com/edit?id=18111479

> With cheap music streaming services such as spotify, apple music and google play as well as video streaming such as netflix and amazon, does anyone need bittorrent anymore?

Covering just the "evil, bad" piracy angle: very much yes. If you're not in the US, you can usually stream some small subset of movies and TV shows, often months after their release (which means you've missed out on participating in global comentary, which happens immediately after release). Then, streaming services like to remove titles at random, without notice. So the movie you streamed legally last year and want to show to your SO today might no longer be available (happens to me frequently with Netflix).

I love bittorrent. I control the quality, the availability, the (lack of) DRM and the price of any media (books, music, movies, series). The only thing that comes close is bandcamp.com but that's only for music AFAIK.

I've waited for about half a minute and the page still doesn't display anything but just loads my CPU (I have retried a number of times with no luck).

I can load it on mobile, but it won't let me scroll down to read more than the first half sentence.

Yeah same here on android chrome. How can something so simple as a blog post can have so many problems just rendering?

Any marketing blog posts / pages should always be (cached) static HTML.

Helps a lot if you don't have to render content that will remain mostly static to thousands upon thousands of visitors instead of just fetching a file and returning that.

Congratulations. You’ve just joined the new borderless economy for exchanging value for computer resources on a global scale.

There's some delay and/or timeout related to the huge amount of tracking scripts they include.

30 seconds should be far more than enough in whatever a case. Needless to say I have all the tracking scripts possible blocked as, probably, almost everybody else on HN.

Back in the day, Mojo Nation (one of Bittorrent's ancestors -- sort of) incentivized people for sharing their disk space and network bandwidth. You'd earn "mojo" for doing that, and could trade it for faster downloads.

An interview: https://www.salon.com/2000/10/09/mojo_nation/

The entire page must be an advertisement... it is rendered as blank white page (uBlock Origin).

Nice, not even 4 months after releasing this.

http://blog.bittorrent.com/2018/06/19/user-message/

Looks similar to http://joystream.co which has been paying users with BCH for the past few months.

would much rather use bitcoin cash over a tron backed token.

Tron is nothing more than a pump and dump with a pagiarised whitepaper.

It avoids saying pay for files, I feel like the music/media industry’s lawyers would have a fieldday with anyone using this to “share” music files

Firefox doesn't like the site:

> The resource at “https://s3.amazonaws.com/downloads.mailchimp.com/js/mc-valid... was blocked because tracking protection is enabled.

Is it just me or is scrolling broken on mobile?

Works fine in the in-app browser of “Hacker News” on iOS

The only browser engine allowed on iOS is Safari's.

For Firefox on Android, it's broken for me too.

Great website, doesn't load with an ad blocker enabled. Fucking late stage ad tech..

I use uBlock in Chrome and it seems to load fine.

Loaded just fine for me on Firefox with uBlock origin

Loads but can't scroll at all on Firefox Android, making it completely useless.

Not exactly confidence inspiring.

cannot scroll on chrome (android) either

Use Desktop mode, someone didn't check whether the website loads properly. Also had the same problem with Chrome on Android

It loads but it takes the same amount of time to start that Gmail does.

It loads, it just has a display: none; on the body that you need to remove with the browser inspector.

I have same problem. FF mobile and uBlock origin.

Seeing the fluff the page contains in the top comment made me think I didnt miss much.

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